


Conference Call

by Pachycephalosaur



Category: Homestuck, Mother of Learning - nobody103, Naruto, Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen, Interdimensional shenanigans, Telepathic Bond, Time Shenanigans, chris makes new friends, ino experiences culture shock, roxy is just doing her best, zorian is solving all the mysteries
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-15 17:45:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 50,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18503944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pachycephalosaur/pseuds/Pachycephalosaur
Summary: Four people from across a vast multiverse are connected through a ‘Node’ — a telepathic hub allowing them to exchange messages in real-time — and must work together to face the coming challenges using nothing but their wits and a pinhole-sized interdimensional portal.Time travel, a massive cast, jokes, alternate universes, dialogue, philosophy, and more.





	1. Introduction/Prelude

  
Originally posted of the [Sufficient Velocity forums](https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/posts/11279755/), later ported to [Spacebattles](https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/50859034).

Tags are WIP. Chapter porting is a WIP. For a full synopsis, please view one of the above links.

  
**Prelude**

Node 0903 has opened!

ModThunder: /admin canMessageList = ‘mod’  
ModThunder: /inviteFrom Queue

Anonymous user detected  
Auto-Pseudonym enabled  
********* has been renamed kWin  
iYamanaka, rLalonde, zKazinski, kWin invited to node (+5.6%, +35.6%, +3.2%, +8.3%)  
Translation Service activated (+8.5%)

ModThunder: 35%?!  
ModThunder: /node status 1

Systems Overclocked (Critical)  
Core at 101.6% ^  
Node Population: 5  
User Count: 4  
Realm Count: 4  
Page 1/6

ModThunder: FUCK.  
ModThunder: /admin coreLock .7

Error: Threshold too low!

ModThunder: /admin coreLock .9

5 services locked (-13.8%)  
Systems capped at 90% Core usage  
For a full list of enabled/disabled features, do '/node services'

ModThunder: Okay, that should work.  
ModThunder: /node status 1

Systems stable  
Core at 87.8% ~  
Node Population: 5  
User Count: 4  
Realm Count: 4  
Page 1/6

ModThunder: You guys don’t know it, but I just averted disaster.  
ModThunder: You can thank me later. :)

  



	2. An Invitation Extended (Arc 1)

[You have been invited to join Node0903. Do you accept?]

Chris felt the thought slide into his mind. Random intrusive thoughts weren’t something he was totally unfamiliar with, especially with his power, but this was clearly different. Whatever it was, it made no effort in disguising that it was a foreign agent reaching into his head. His power at least bothered to try to pass itself off as normal thinking.

His eyes drifted around the classroom, trying to see if any of the other students were being targeted by this effect. He briefly looked over at Carlos near the front of the room, the only other person he knew to be a parahuman in the class. Nothing, no acknowledgement.

The thought was weird, less like something he thought himself and more like an entirely new sense opened up, allowing him to perceive it like he perceived the voice in his head. It was a lot like what he imagined a telepathic message would be like, but it lingered, staying within the purview of his awareness. And it wanted him to 'accept' it.

_Yeah, no,_ he thought.

He raised his hand, and asked to be excused to the restroom. When the privilege was granted, he moved determinedly through the halls, into the first open bathroom stall. He pulled out his PRT phone and immediately dialed for help.

“PRT Console, status?” said a man’s voice.

“Kid Win here, out of costume. I’m at Arcadia and I need a Master/Strange screening _immediately_. I don’t know the exact nature of the effect, or who is involved, but it’s a _brain thing_ , and it wants me to agree to an ‘invitation'.”

“Kid Win, we’re sending a PRT transport your way. You’ll need to change into your costume before pickup, is this acceptable? What are the chances of a hostile parahuman on the premise?”

He sighed. _Really? Changing into costume? At a time like this?_

“High. The effect started while I was in class. It’s like a telepathic message, and it’s inviting me to join a ‘Node’. Uh, my identity is also possibly compromised, because the effect targeted me while I was out of costume.”

“Understood. We’re calling in an investigation of potential parahuman activity. A report has been sent to your school. Make your way to your designated changing area, and prepare for pickup at the front gates. Best of luck.”

There was a click on the line. Chris stared down at his phone for what could only have been about twenty seconds (feeling like an eternity, of course) when the intercom system crackled on. “Attention students, we are now under lock-down. This is not a drill.”

The hallways would clear out in a minute or so, then he could get moving.

❖

[You have been invited to join Node0903. Do you accept?]

Ino was sitting at the dinner table with her family when the strange thought hit her.

She examined the strange mental entity for a moment. It was from an outside source, a type of direct contact, and seemingly passive (i.e. not rooting through her memories or anything). That was a good sign that this is either a telepathic connection, or a very dangerous mental boobytrap. The user could clearly already send messages, so what was the point in asking for permission to make contact?

She shrugged off her worries. She was right across the table from her father, the greatest mind-control expert in the world, so she was sure she would be safe.

“Hey Daddy, somebody’s trying to drop a telepathic payload off. I’m going to open it, if that’s okay?”

He looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

“Darling, I know we’ve talked about the dangers of unknown mental effects. Can you pass the thing to me, and let me check it out first?”

“But it’s been delivered to me, shouldn’t I open it? It could be private!” she smiled, knowing very well that her dad would let her get away with just about anything so long as he was watching over her. Realistically, it was probably just another member of her clan, trying to contact her for some reason or another. Not many other people could send telepathic messages, after all.

After a moment’s trepidation, he relented. “Okay, but be careful.”

At first she tried to poke at the package with her chakra, but couldn’t even find its physical location in her brain. That was interesting, because that should only be possible if the mental effect was either super small, or incredibly well-hidden. It has no reason to be hidden if it was just going to announce itself, right?

She directed a thought at the package.

_I agree._

[Connection established.]

❖

Roxy looked at the distant clouds of volcanic ash rolling towards her. By any reasonable estimate, her and her friends only had a few minutes until the pyroclastic flow reached them.

Just minutes ago, she was almost four-hundred years in the future, and the universe was being destroyed. Because of said destruction of reality, she was forced to escape into the past to avoid the tragic end of fucking everything.

Of course, they used a one-way time portal, and, due to a number of complex temporal factors and paradox prevention protocols, could only escape to a single deserted island at a point in time where the local volcano decided to violently erupt. _Out of the skillet, into the lava._

She looked over at her friend Dirk, who was busy lathing some weird alchemical crystal dowel into a mystic totem. She wasn’t one to judge the esoteric item-crafting systems in most games, but this? This really took the cake.

“Hey, not meaning to rush you or anything, but there’s hot-ass volcano clouds coming this way.”

“Do said hot-ass volcano clouds look like they’re something you can deal with in a timely manner? Because if not, we shouldn’t worry about them and just do what we can to survive. This is our last chance, after all.”

She briefly glanced over at Dirk’s severed head. The other Dirk’s severed head, that is. If she understood it right, they each had started with an ‘extra life’. But before they could even start the game, they lost these lives.

They were about to go all _Jumanji_ into a magical video-game world with only one life apiece. Her friend Jake suggested that they were actually closer to going all _Zathura: A Space Adventure_ , but this really wasn’t the time to humor him or his horrifyingly impressive ability to remember the full name of that movie.

[You have been invited to join Node0903. Do you accept?]

Roxy was startled by this, but only briefly. Was this part of the game? She shrugged it off and agreed. Can’t hurt more than lava.

_Sure._

[Connection established.]

❖

“Good morning, brother! Morning, morning, MORNING!”

Zorian groaned as his sister nearly knocked the breath out of him, waking him up from his sleep.

That wasn’t the first time this has happened to him. It wasn’t the second, either. No, that was the third time his sister has thrown her full weight into him as a wake-up call. It was also the third time he had woken up for the first day of school after the summer, and the third time he’d started that day.

The first time it seemed simple enough. He was attending Cyoria’s Royal Academy of Magical Arts, where he died to an unexpected lich attack on the day of the Summer Festival, and woke up a month in the past. He managed to go through the month over again, happy to just have a second chance at living. He got to the end of the month, avoided his own death, and…

Woke up a month in the past. Despite not dying the second time.

He was at a loss for what to do.

[You have been invited to join Node0903. Do you accept?]

And whatever that was, it wasn't good either.

Zorian sat up, and looked around his room. While he was distracted thinking about the previous day, Kirielle had snuck out of his room to take the bathroom to herself. For the third time, thanks to time-travel.

Now not only was he a time traveler that hallucinated strange sentences, but he was a time traveler that hallucinated strange sentences without any access to bathing facilities.

He climbed out of bed, and focused on the situation. The invitation was persistent, not something he could easily ignore. Did this weird message have something to do with the time travel? Unfortunately, there was only way to find out, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to commit to whatever it was.

He needed to talk to somebody, and get to the bottom of this.

❖

Chris sat in simple cell, awaiting further testing.

He had no way of knowing what was going on the outside: if his identity was compromised, if the culprit has been identified, or even if he was the only target. The weird mental influence still clung in his mind, unchanging. A few hours ago, he had to undergo several brain-scans in an attempt to detect something. He also didn’t know the results of those.

So, left alone in his cell, he was forced to put up with nothing but his own thoughts for company. His attention was constantly tugged between thoughts of the outside world, his power feeding him loads of garbled super-science that he could barely comprehend, and that message. Any time he found himself trying to distract himself from one thing, his mind inevitably wandered to the next.

He was afraid of what could be happening outside his cell, and seemingly in response to the stress, his power was feeding him information to things he could make. But he couldn’t focus on it, because everything else was more important. He’d be halfway through a mental diagram of a laser pistol or something, and suddenly find himself wondering what was going on the outside, or inspecting the message in the back of his head.

It felt taunting. His power was finally working with him, but it was giving him something he couldn’t remember or write down notes on. It was hanging in front of him like a prize, and yet he kept getting dragged back by his learning disorder and that 'invitation'.

His thoughts were slipping between his fingers, out of control. Protocol dictated holding him for twelve hours. He would just have to deal with it until they finally pulled him out.

So he waited.

❖

iYamanaka has joined the Node!  
ModThunder: Welcome!  
iYamanaka: Uh  
iYamanaka: What is this?  
ModThunder: This is Node0903, and I’m your host here.  
rLalonde has joined the Node!  
ModThunder: It’s an inter-cosmological construct, designed to build connections between disparate and conflicting multiversal models.  
ModThunder: Together, we can build a more coherent multiverse!  
iYamanaka: Whatever you just said makes no sense to me.  
rLalonde: thats p sweet but i have to ask  
rLalonde: does this or does this not have any bearing on the game  
iYamanaka: Game?  
iYamanaka: What game?  
rLalonde: just by askin that you answered my question  
rLalonde: this isnt sburb cosmic bullshit this is just some unrelated cosmic bullshit to go alongside it  
rLalonde: like a cosmic bullshit 2 for 1 deal

  
Ino was taken aback by this. Was this some sort of weird prank?

“Is something wrong, Ino?”

“No, it’s nothing. The mental package wasn’t dangerous, but it was weird.”

His brow furrowed at this. “And does this message make you uncomfortable?” She knew this look on his face. If anybody had sent his little princess something pervy or gross, they would be feeling his full wrath. Considering how closely he worked with the Torture & Interrogation department, that was a fate literally worse than death.

“No, nothing like that!” she defended, “I’m more confused by it than anything.”

ModThunder: So, let me give you two some background. Originally my organization was working on a multiversal unification project, to combine disparate realities with conflicting cosmological structures into a more coherent whole.  
ModThunder: We had a system we referred to as the Prime Hub, which would be the framework for this project. We lined up thousands of candidates to connect to as the emissaries from their realities.  
rLalonde: and howd this work out for you  
ModThunder: I’m getting there. So, we booted up the Prime Hub, but several parts of it began to de-sync from the whole.  
ModThunder: We ended up breaking the whole thing down into a series of Nodes, which have more limited processing power, but can be manually calibrated and re-combined to construct the Prime Hub.  
rLalonde: okay so  
rLalonde: that much i can understand  
rLalonde: but why did u make it a chatroom  
rLalonde: is psychic aol a thing we really need?

  
“Do you want me to take a look at it?”

“I… don’t think you could if you wanted. Whatever technique is making it, it’s not done through standard means.”

“In what way?” he seemed genuinely curious at this point, not upset like she was worried he would be.

“It’s hard to explain. It’s probably nothing.” He wouldn’t believe her, she knew, but he wouldn’t press on. He’d just say-

“Alright, but tell me if you need anything.” _Yup._ They both understood the way this relationship worked, and so long as she wanted privacy, she’d have it.

iYamanaka: Let’s back up a moment.  
iYamanaka: My name is Ino Yamanaka.  
iYamanaka: We’re from different universes or something, right?  
iYamanaka: Will me saying that I’m from Konohagakure mean anything to you?  
ModThunder: I can’t say that helps me any. I didn’t get anything other than the translation files.  
rLalonde: translation files?  
ModThunder: Ino is speaking something closely analogous to what you would call the ‘Japanese’ language. I’m translating as accurately as possible in real-time.  
rLalonde: so whatre you gonna do if i start speaking japanese  
rLalonde: like if i just drop a kawaii in here  
rLalonde: how did you translate that last line  
iYamanaka: What the fuck?  
ModThunder: I translated it to ‘English’, of course.  
ModThunder: That’s not a language that naturally exists on Ino’s world, so it looks completely ridiculous to her.  
rLalonde: they had japan but never england?  
iYamanaka: We never had a ‘Japan’.  
ModThunder: It’s convergent cultural evolution. It’s a factor we looked for when picking our first batch of cosmologies.  
ModThunder: The existence of humans was also a favorable factor. Every person to join this Node will be human.  
iYamanaka: Wait!  
iYamanaka: There will be others?

  


❖

Roxy was ready for just about anything when she decided to finally buckle down and play the game. She didn’t expect to have a psychic version of Pesterchum installed directly into her brain, but she could at least argue that she was as ready for it as much as she could be.

Well, she could be more ready, but there wasn’t any liquor on hand.

“Roxy, we’re about to enter,” said Dirk, catching her attention away from the distinct lack of booze, “Me, Jane, and you won’t be at our houses when we enter, so we’re going to have to make our way back as a team.”

Right, yeah. SBURB brought the player's whole house into the game and turned it into their own personal hub-world. Since she wasn't in her house at the moment, she’d have to make her way back to it from Jake’s house.

Actually, the house thing might be where Jake’s Zathura line came from. All Roxy could remember from that one was the house being put in space and fourteen shots of vodka.

rLalonde: how many others  
rLalonde: thats the real q  
ModThunder: There will be two others joining us, should they accept the invitation like you did.  
rLalonde: what happens if they deny?  
ModThunder: Um.  
ModThunder: I beg your pardon?  
iYamanaka: What happens if they reject the request?  
iYamanaka: Also how do you not understand the question if you’re translating?  
ModThunder: You seem to misunderstand.  
ModThunder: There is no way to reject the option. If they do not accept immediately, it will simply wait until they're ready.  
iYamanaka: Oh no.  
rLalonde: whats wrong?  
iYamanaka: Roxy, you remember how the invitation felt in your mind, right? How you couldn’t ever really ignore it?  
rLalonde: oh  
rLalonde: shit  
ModThunder: I don’t understand the problem.

  
Roxy saw the game-supplied alchemy station glow briefly, and a large tree of green crystal shot up from it, and from the tree a grim, skeletal pinata hung from a noose. Now all they had to do was solve the puzzle the game presented to them, and they could enter the game-world.

The puzzle was straightforward. Jake didn’t waste a moment before drawing a pistol and shooting it. There was a blinding wall of energy that flared up around the house, and when it faded, there was nary volcano nor fire in sight - only green fields and red stones dotting the landscape for as far as the eye could see.

❖

Zorian was having an awful train ride.

It was mainly the fault of that weird message in his head, beckoning him to accept an invitation into a ‘Node’. He had no way to get rid of it, and trying to will it away was also failing him.

The thought that whatever it might be couldn't be undone bugged him enough for him to just try to ignore it. He would need to practice ignoring it if it were to remain a long-term fixture. Partway through the ride he started a mental dialog with himself over the thing.

Do I accept it? Is it worth the risk if it means getting a few more answers? He thought, and for much of the ride he continued like this, growing frustrated with the way the 'Node' tantalized him with both potential answers and threatened him with an unknown, until he got fed up with it and vented his frustrations to himself. I wish I could just accept it and get this over with.

[Connection established.]

zKazinski has joined the Node!  
iYamanaka: Did you join on purpose, or by accident?  
iYamanaka: We’re trying to prove a point to somebody.  
rLalonde: weve been trying for hours  
zKazinski: What?  
zKazinski: What is this?  
iYamanaka: Answer the question!  
iYamanaka: This is very important!  
zKazinski: It was an accident.  
iYamanaka: Hell yeah, I knew it!  
rLalonde: i know ur probs super pumped to be right about smthn  
rLalonde: but some1 accidentally joining an inescapable brain chatroom isnt worth celebrating  
rLalonde: im roxy btw  
rLalonde: and iyamanaka is ino  
zKazinski: Uh.  
zKazinski: Zorian.  
ModThunder: Okay, so I’ll admit our group might have made a small error in our implementation of the Node system. It's too late to change it now, though.  
iYamanaka: I earned the right to be super pumped. I knew exactly what would happen.  
rLalonde: no post-release patch?  
ModThunder: I don’t understand what you mean. You mean change the system after it’s been implemented?  
ModThunder: That would be incredibly difficult!  
rLalonde: u must somehow be even worse than the betty-crocker coding team  
rLalonde: ever see the the back-end of their codebase?  
rLalonde: it would look better if it was typed by a rhesus monkey  
rLalonde: u have outdone them

  
He got off the train in a near-stupor. He had no idea how much of this he had missed, or what they were talking about. The drizzle of the rain around the station didn’t help his mood any, either.

He started making his way to the Royal Academy. Somebody would have answers, whether it be in the Node or in the Academy.

ModThunder: Listen, while I understand your criticism of our methods, comparing our methodology to that of a monkey is just unfair.  
zKazinski: Actually, Roxy claimed that your work is two steps down from that of a monkey.  
zKazinski: Not that I understand anything else about this conversation.  
zKazinski: Or method of conversation.  
iYamanaka: Right, let me explain it so you don’t have to spend hours arguing with Thunder like we did.  
iYamanaka: So, basically, we’re all from different worlds.  
iYamanaka: If you already have different worlds, just think more different from that.  
iYamanaka: Like if there’s an afterlife or a uh  
iYamanaka: What was that thing, Roxy?  
rLalonde: parallel universe  
iYamanaka: Right. If there’s any of that stuff, which can normally be reached by your world, we’re not from that. Our universes are closed off from each other, and can only be accessed from the outside.  
rLalonde: *multiverses  
zKazinski: Why multiverses?  
zKazinski: Shouldn’t there be only one multiverse?  
rLalonde: cuz we already have universes where im from, and our idea of '''multiverse'''' doesnt follow the same rules as the others  
ModThunder: And this is why we use the word ‘cosmological context.'  
ModThunder: It’s all the same multiverse, but different regions often have conflicting models. Roxy’s ‘Paradox Space’ model conflicts with the models of all other participants of this node, for instance.

  
Zorian was far more annoyed than confused at this point. It wasn’t hard to piece together what was happening based on the information available to him, but the trick was figuring out how the Node connected to everything else: the invasion, that strange spell the lich cast on him, and the time travel.

Any explanation would be better than nothing, and most importantly, he would definitely be checking to make sure this was safe.

zKazinski: Okay, so we’re in other 'cosmological contexts.'  
zKazinski: Is communicating in this way safe, and does this have anything to do with the time-travel?  
iYamanaka: The time travel?  
ModThunder: It’s safe.  
ModThunder: If you’re a time-traveler, and if that’s rare in your reality, then it’s likely that this trait was factored into picking you for the Node program. We prefer people who are exceptional in some way.  
iYamanaka: I’m exceptional?  
iYamanaka: More exceptional than the other girls, right?  
iYamanaka: Also, Roxy, you need to show me how you changed the color of your name!  
ModThunder: I am not in a position to answer that question, we had millions of candidates, I don’t know all of them.  
zKazinski: Why is this contingent on time-travel being rare?  
zKazinski: Are there places where it’s common?  
rLalonde: u have no idea

  


❖

“Okay, Kid Win, we need you to explain to us exactly what happened.”

“I was sitting in class, when something contacted me. Mentally. I managed to stay calm and report the event to the PRT, before changing into costume and having a PRT van pick me up. The school went into lockdown.”

The PRT officer didn’t move. He turned to face Deputy Director Renick. Renick gave a silent nod of agreement, and looked at Chris.

“Chris, I must inform you that this event coincided with a brief world-wide blackout of precognitive powers. Powers based on predictive models were unaffected, but all powers that can actually predict the future briefly... sputtered out. They’re back online, so we have reason to believe that you should attempt to establish contact."

Renick ignored the look on Chris’s face. In this moment, he was all business, and leaving a Ward alarmed was tiny compared to what everyone else had been going through for the past few hours.

“The intel group Watchdog says it’s not a Master or Stranger effect, and that this might be our only lead on what caused the issue. We understand the risk involved, but we have very few windows where our precognitives can go dark without interfering with any important business, which may happen if you interact with this thing. Precog blackouts happen sometimes, on a smaller scale, so we have systems in place for this. We should be clear for the next 72 hours, if you choose to accept this ‘invitation’.”

“Are you sure it’s not dangerous?” Chris felt the world spinning, and everything was happening too fast. He needed a moment to catch himself.

“No. We’re not. This is an unknown phenomenon with world-shaking implications. The higher ups nearly had a fit when it was found to be related to a Ward, and we're trying to resolve it ASAP. We’re calling it Case 195, and you are either one of many victims of the event, or at the epicenter of it.”

Chris took a deep breath, letting the air fill his lungs and the light-headedness fade with his inhalation. The bad feelings were back within seconds, but in his moment of clarity he had already decided on what to do.

“Alright.”

Chris accepted the strange invitation.

[Connection established.]

kWin has joined the Node!  
ModThunder: Oh good, we’re all here now!  
ModThunder: Congratulations on being picked to build a more coherent multiverse!  
kWin: ...  
kWin: Okay, I’m going to need an explanation.  


  



	3. Sharing (Arc 1)

Shikamaru didn’t look away from the window, watching the rain run down the glass even as he spoke. “Can you only talk to them, or is there more to it?”

“I don’t know! They told me I was picked for this because I’m exceptional, and that I had an important job to do.” She had a smug look on her face, as if being picked for a strange inter-dimensional conspiracy was a good thing.

Shikamaru mumbled something that sounded a lot like ‘They should have kept their mouths shut,' which prompted Choji to almost choke on his chip. Ino gave them a long, sharp look, daring them to say anything else.  


tipsyGnostalgic: so my planet was originally a place called earth  
Kid_Win: _Originally?_  
Kid_Win: I’m from an Earth too.  
tipsyGnostalgic: really????  
tipsyGnostalgic: what year?  
Kid_Win: 2010  
zKazinski: You two shared the same world?  
tipsyGnostalgic: probs not  
tipsyGnostalgic: 2425  
Ino!: WHAT!  
Ino!: You two are practically an era apart!

  
“And what do you think that job will be, anyway?” Shikamaru says, pulling her back into reality.

“That’s the weird part. The Thunder guy keeps being super vague, and it doesn’t seem like he knows much himself.”

Choji hummed at that. “Maybe he’s just lying?” he asked as he thoughtfully licked the salt off another chip. Ino tried not to watch his weirdly intimate chip-eating experience, and instead focused on his point. Thunder could be lying, but what would the point be if he could already reach into the minds of people across entire multiverses? He’d already be super powerful, or at least super good at mind techniques. What could she provide?  


Kid_Win: Do you have any useful future technology for us primitives?  
Kid_Win: Also, we should discuss some key points in time where our timelines might have diverged.  
Kid_Win: Earth Bet and Earth Aleph diverged in the 1980’s.  
tipsyGnostalgic: what month is it?  
Kid_Win: December.  
tipsyGnostalgic: did a baking company release a brainwashing headband in the past few months?  
Kid_Win: Uh.  
Kid_Win: No?  
tipsyGnostalgic: lucky u

  
Shikamaru took a turn being thoughtful. Not that he needed a turn to do that. “Alright, let’s shelve that issue for now. It’s a drag to worry about the motivations of people we don’t know anything about, agreed?”

Choji and Ino nodded in the affirmative, urging him to continue. When Shikamaru decides to start using longer sentences to get his point across, it’s time to start listening.

“What we need to consider is that these people have their own worlds, and possibly their own techniques. We’ll never fight them, so it won’t hurt them to share their techniques. Likewise, it won’t hurt for you to share your techniques with them.”

Ino gave Shikamaru a long, hard look. The gravity of his suggestion could not be understated. The ninja world wasn’t the kind of place where information was traded lightly. Sharing clan techniques undermined the entire clan and could easily destroy it once the technique’s weaknesses were understood.

“Maybe that’s what Thunder wants, though? Me to share my mental techniques with the others so that he can steal them? There’s not proof the others aren’t just him taking on roles to convince me.”

“Sounds unlikely to me. You’ve already figured out he’s somehow doing this without chakra, so your methods probably aren’t compatible. And even if they are, you can’t defend against mental attacks that don’t use chakra, so why not just steal the knowledge from you?”

They sat for a few more moments, listening to the sound of rain falling and chips crunching, and Ino focused in on the other conversation.  


zKazinski: You picked that point out pretty specifically.  
zKazinski: It sounds pretty ridiculous, but why shouldn’t that be the case on all ‘Earths’?  
tipsyGnostalgic: cuz  
tipsyGnostalgic: it never happened on b1 earth  
tipsyGnostalgic: im from b2  
Kid_Win: You have multiple Earths?  
Kid_Win: We know about two, but there are lots of indications of even more existing.  
Kid_Win: Earth Bet and Earth Aleph.  
Kid_Win: They diverged in 1982, when Scion appeared alongside the first parahumans on Earth Bet.  
Ino!: Parahuman?  
Kid_Win: People with special powers.  
tipsyGnostalgic: wait  
tipsyGnostalgic: “kid win”  
Ino!: You meant like bloodline abilities?  
tipsyGnostalgic: oh my god are you a superhero?  
Kid_Win: Yes! I’m a member of the Brockton Bay Wards.

  
“They’re talking about how two of their worlds compare and contrast. The worlds started out the same, but things changed and now they’re different.”

Shikamaru continued to stare out into the rain, absorbing the information into whatever complex string of thoughts he currently had.

Ino continued to watch the conversation to pass by, and began explaining the parts she understood to Shikamaru.

They started by debating the existence of a city called ‘Brockton Bay’, and had been slowly moving up the timeline starting from the founding of the city until the year 2011, looking for historical deviation. World-wide wars, the invention of ‘nuclear’ weapons, the writing of certain books and the invention of various machines were all being compared.

Roxy thought it was hysterical that Brockton Bay was so historically insignificant that major events could go exactly the same without it, which Kid Win took offense to. Despite an entire additional city being added, the only major deviations to history seemed to start in the late 1800’s, when a company called ‘Betty Crocker’ began moving into the tech industry on Roxy’s world.

Kid Win’s world changed massively in 1982, when the first parahumans appeared. They discussed the impacts of this for a while, before they started talking about the way technology changed in both worlds. That was where they completely lost Ino, and Zorian was interested but struggled to keep up with the jargon. Something about alien and ‘digital reality’ technology versus ‘tinker-tech’?

Shikamaru eventually cut Ino’s attempt at keeping up with their conversation off by introducing a subject that was much more practical. “They have better technology than us. We can use that.”

❖

Roxy was sitting with her friends, looking out over the grassy plains and still talking with the cool superhero in her head when a weird noise like a bike horn caught her attention.

Her, Jane, Jake, and Dirk all looked up to see a horned, gray skinned clown with a massive codpiece. His face was scarred heavily, and he wore smudged face-paint that highlighted the unhinged look in his eyes.

He smiled at them and waved. Jane’s face immediately fell into a scowl.

“Oh, not _this guy_ again.”

The clown began doing a jolly walk towards them. Jane eyed him suspiciously, and her eyes quickly darted to the glowing orb that spawned just before they started the game. Roxy followed her gaze, watching the rapidly pulsing ball. It was floating in the air, glowing with green energy and being a seizure hazard.

Jane explained that it was a revive system right before they entered the game, when it first appeared as part of the tutorial. She warned them to not let the weird clown use it on his friends/victims, because he ended up using hers the first time she entered by throwing two corpses into it. They ended up fusing into a horrific amalgamation before exploding.

Dirk stepped forwards, and drew his sword, daring the clown to approach. The troll stopped, pulled two alien corpses out of his inventory, and held one corpse in each hand before closing his eyes and giving a toothy smile. Dirk charged in with a downwards slash, hoping to keep the troll at bay. In a blink of an eye, the troll dodged and reappeared next to the orb.

Jake drew his pistols and fired several shots, but the troll just body-tanked the shots, letting purple fluid dribble out of the wounds. He tossed the corpses at the ball, and the orb erupted into a flash of blinding lights. When the glow faded, the clown was gone, and the ghostly fusion of two trolls floated in the air before them.

The whole encounter lasted maybe five seconds at most, and they lost a revive.  


tipsyGnostalgic: im gonna have 2 go  
tipsyGnostalgic: somethins up  
Ino!: So you have a special power, Kid?  
Kid_Win: Yeah, I’m a tinker, which means that I know how to build super-advanced technology that nobody else can.  
Ino!: How is that a special power?  
Ino!: Isn't that just being really smart?  
Kid_Win: No, the knowledge comes from my power.  
Kid_Win: I’m not even good at math, which gives me difficulty when designing stuff.  
zKazinski: I’m good with math, so I'll just solve any problem you send me, in exchange for your scientific expertise.  
Kid_Win: Deal!  
Kid_Win: Honestly, just being able to write down numbers in here so I don't forget them will be a huge help.

  
Jake looked at the spirit and smiled at it like nothing wrong happened, introducing himself happily. It was a green ghost, with a long spectral tail in place of legs and many features of the two corpses thrown into it.

One of the corpses had four horns, and was wearing 3D glasses. It gave the spirit two horns on one side of the head, and his red and blue glasses were the only thing that retained their original color under the green glow of ectoplasm.

The other corpse had jagged, lightning-bolt shaped horns and fins, along with a dyed streak in his hair. The ghost resulting from the corpse also had one of his distinctive horns, a single fan-like fin branching out from one side of his face, and a light streak in his hair that shined a slightly different shade of green.

Both of them had been dressed like douchebag hipsters, but their combination took all the distinctive features of both without any regards for a cohesive wardrobe. Not that the fish guy had a cohesive wardrobe anyways; the one saving grace was that his ridiculous pin-striped pants were replaced by the ghostly tail.  


Kid_Win: So, what's your deal, Ino?  
Ino!: I’m a ninja, with the Yamanaka clan.  
Ino!: We specialize in mental techniques.  
zKazinski: Mundane mental techniques, like brainwashing? Or do you include things like mind control?  
Ino!: Mind control, body swapping, telepathy, memory theft.  
Ino!: More esoteric things we don't talk about with outsiders.  
Kid_Win: All of that at once?  
Ino!: Yeah, alongside standard ninja techniques.  
zKazinski: Define ‘standard ninja techniques.'  
Ino!: Don’t you have ninja?  
Kid_Win: Strictly speaking, yes.  
Kid_Win: But we don’t tend to lump ‘mind control’ with other things a ninja does.  
Ino!: Illusions, elemental powers, walking on walls, enhanced strength, enhanced reflexes.  
Kid_Win: You get all that in addition to mind powers?

  
Roxy and her friends took several long seconds to look at the phantom troll. The troll looked back at them. Dirk broke the silence. “We’re going to need to get to our houses before he does this again.”

“Who did this? Why am I fused with this fucker? And why am I fused with that fucker?” the ghost said, with a slight lisp and an unplaceable accent.

“Some weird juggalo troll threw you.”

The sprite contemplated that for a moment.

“Gamzee. That _asshole_.” It sounded a bit like ‘ath-hole’. Roxy hid a dumb grin at that. “Is he doing this with all of our leftover bodies? Who’s he gotten so far?”

Jane spoke up. “He did a guy with brown blood and a girl with blue blood. They exploded.”

The ghost laughed uproariously, but his laughter slowed down into a grim chuckle. “Wow, what a goddamn incident that must’ve been. Anyways, it was fucking awful meeting you guys, and if blowing the fuck up is an option, I’m gonna do it now so I can kill this other asshole.” It seemed as if both halves of himself were referring to each other on that point.

There was a several second long pause, where the ghost looked extremely constipated, clenching his fists open and closed. Sparks flew off of his transparent body, but nothing happened.

“Great, I’m stuck sharing my body with a douchebag, and it’s all that clown’s fault.”

❖

Zorian had made his way to his room, and was sitting in the bed, trying to decide if having people thinking he was crazy was worth explaining his problem to someone. Obviously, he could talk to the voices in his head, but that wouldn’t be very conducive to getting the opinions of a non-partial audience, even if they were less annoying than other groups of people.

Obviously, he was going to still talk to them, especially if what sounded like a civilization hundreds of years beyond his own was offering up free technological advancement in exchange for arithmetic.  


tipsyGnostalgic: alright im back  
zKazinski: Just in time for my turn at talking about my world.  
Kid_Win: Roxy, scroll up to Ino’s stuff about her world.  
Kid_Win: It’s nothing but ninjas and it’s totally badass.  
tipsyGnostalgic: is ‘scroll up’ even a valid term when ur talkin about interacting with mental abstractions???  
tipsyGnostalgic: but i caught up b4 respondin  
zKazinski: So, I should start with mages, seeing as how that seems to be the main difference between my world and your worlds.  
zKazinski: We have an energy we call ‘mana’, which seems to differ from Ino’s ‘chakra’ in several key ways. ‘Chakra’ may have elemental properties, all mana is effectively equivalent for the purposes of spells.  
tipsyGnostalgic: wait  
tipsyGnostalgic: are you a wizard?  
tipsyGnostalgic: like an actual wizard  
Kid_Win: Holy shit.  
Kid_Win: He’s a wizard.  
zKazinski: Can we stay on subject?  
tipsyGnostalgic: u single?

  
What?  


tipsyGnostalgic: im just sayin for the record that im 15 and totes eligible if ur around that age  
tipsyGnostalgic: *wink*  
Ino!: ROXY!  
Ino!: STOP!  
tipsyGnostalgic: wow i cant flirt with NOBODY  
Ino!: Not in my brain, you can’t!

  
Zorian, also being a teenager and generally socially isolated, tried not to think too hard about how a weird voice in his head was flirting with him. He didn’t need this sort of distraction in his life.  


Kid_Win: Do you also have dragons and other fantasy stuff?  
zKazinski: We have dragons, but you’re going to have to define ‘other fantasy stuff’.  
zKazinski: I hate to break it to you, but I’m not completely aware of all the difference between our worlds.  
Kid_Win: Elves?  
zKazinski: Never heard of them.  
Kid_Win: Giant spiders?  
zKazinski: Yes.  
Kid_Win: Trolls?  
zKazinski: Yes.  
tipsyGnostalgic: im just gonna assume your trolls are different from mine  
Kid_Win: They don’t have swirly colorful hair and gemstones in their bellies, do they?  
Ino!: Okay we must all have very different ideas of trolls.  
Ino!: Unless something is being lost in translation?  
ModThunder: There is so much being lost in translation right now. I’m translating to ‘ogre’ for you, but that just means that all of you have very different ideas in your heads.  
tipsyGnostalgic: we are gettin so off-topic  
tipsyGnostalgic: so wizard stuff  
tipsyGnostalgic: illusions, summoning, healing, necromancy, fireballs, mindreading, telekinesis, shields, flying, enchanting  
tipsyGnostalgic: what of that can ur type of wizards do?  
zKazinski: Illusions (considered outdated), medicine, necromancy (illegal), fireballs, mindreading (illegal), telekinesis, shields. Sustained flight is possible but impractical. It’s easier to just teleport.  
zKazinski: Creating items that interact with and control mana is an entire field of study.  
Ino!: You think illusions are outdated?  
Ino!: I’m going to have to train you in proper illusion usage.  
zKazinski: Why do an illusion when you can just create the actual effect?  
Ino!: Saves chakra/mana, and they force your enemy to spend the same resources reacting to a large number of threats that may or may not be real.  
Kid_Win: Can we back up to enchanting stuff?  
Ino!: If you have an attack you like, and an illusion identical to that attack, your foe must treat all instances of your ‘attack’ as though it might be real, and spend resources defending against it.  
zKazinski: That is rather reasonable, I’ll consider it in the future.  
Kid_Win: I need to hear about magic items.  
Kid_Win: We mainly use electricity for our technology, but mana-powered stuff may have some useful ideas.  
zKazinski: I don’t think it will be useful, considering your world doesn’t have ambient mana to power them.  
Kid_Win: You have an _ambient power-source_?  
zKazinski: Yes, but it’s only strong near Dungeons.  
Kid_Win: I wish I could have anything that cool.  
ModThunder: I have a suggestion.

  


❖

The PRT was having Kid Win relay everything from the telepathic connection to them.

It seemed ridiculously sudden when they asked him to accept the invitation, but when they started interviewing him, he realized that while he was in quarantine for all those hours, the rest of the PRT was considering every possible option on what to do if the connection was dangerous.

The biggest concern turned out to be that not touching the Node would cause problems. Keeping a hero, even a junior hero, on quarantine when they're experiencing an unknown mental effect was generally a good idea, but when the source of the affliction was unidentified, hidden, and capable of striking capes out of costume, it quickly became worth the risk to gather as much information on the situation as possible by pulling them out of containment, even if they had to go the extra mile for safety.

Case in point: The room he was being interviewed in was actually rigged with gas sprayers in the ceiling. He didn’t notice them at first, but the room had little to contemplate but the door (sealed at the bottom to prevent gas leaks), the table, two chairs and the numerous devices hidden in the ceiling. If he suddenly went psycho, they’d probably just fill the room with knockout gas.  


Kid_Win: And what would that be?  
ModThunder: Most of the processing power associated with keeping you in the Node is actually just being spent on reaching your realities. Connecting to you is a minor cost compared to the upfront load of reaching between contexts.  
ModThunder: If you can free up a bit more processing power on the Node, maybe a percentage point or two, this Node has a function that would allow you to open up a free-floating connection, which can be manifested as a tiny inter-contextual portal.  
ModThunder: Not big enough to travel through, but big enough to share energy resources and data.

  
Even as he relayed information, Chris suspected that Armsmaster was probably using his lie-detection technology to record this conversation from several angles, and that they had some psychological profile of him open while watching this interview take place.

It meant that it he had to hide his reaction of excitement and surprise when he learned he might be placed in charge of the next interdimensional portal. That was the sort of thing that could make a parahuman exceptionally famous, like Professor Haywire's portal.

And a source of exotic energy to do whatever he wanted with? _Yes, please._

“Just so you guys know, if this is true and I can actually make a portal to these places, I get exclusive rights to the energy resources.”  


zKazinski: And how would we reduce strain on the Node?  
ModThunder: Easy, by wearing down the conceptual borders between your realities, we can spend less effort on connecting to them individually and more time connecting to them as a group.  
ModThunder: All you have to do is to allow the physical laws of your worlds to intermingle a bit, and we’ll use concepts like ‘the existence of chakra’ to increase coherency.  
ModThunder: Right now I have you hard-capped at using 90% of the Node’s processing power. If you use more, services get shut down to compensate.  
Kid_Win: So if the only function we have right now is talking, how are we supposed to bring our realities closer together?  
Kid_Win: It’s not like I can access chakra just from talking about it.  
ModThunder: Easy!  
ModThunder: You just-  
ModThunder: Uhhh.  
ModThunder: That’s the super secret riddle you have to solve together to unlock the true meaning of friendship!  
ModThunder: Good luck!

  
Chris groaned, loudly.

“Thunder just bailed on the conversation without explaining how we can actually do any of the stuff we’re talking about. I think he dug himself into a corner by admitting we could do more if we had resources, but didn’t have the initial investment to start getting more of these resources.”

Renick nodded, and listened into his earpiece for a second.

“Alright, Chris, we’ve gotten enough data to conclude that unless there’s a trigger or a timer, you won’t start behaving erratically if we let you out. You’ll still be spending the next few days in the Wards' area and your lab for monitoring, after which you’ll be cleared to return to school."

Renick stood up from his seat. “This is a privilege you’re being given, not a right. If any problems are found, we’ll be right back here within five minutes, understood?”  


tipsyGnostalgic: id just like to note  
tipsyGnostalgic: that was totally bullshit  
tipsyGnostalgic: welp  
tipsyGnostalgic: only one thing to do now  
Ino!: Oh no.  
Ino!: Not again.  
zKazinski: What is she doing?  
tipsyGnostalgic: /help

A subject catalogue has been opened in your head! Please use ‘help (subject name)’ to read an entry.

  
A massive space opened up in Chris’s mind, like a library in his head. He flinched, but Renick had already turned his back to him and missed Chris's sudden reaction to the surge of knowledge. It was an immense flood of unprocessable information, it was not unlike his eyes glazing over a giant spreadsheet of data he couldn't quite read. Except it was mental images and concepts, not datacells that were practically turning his brain to mush.  


Kid_Win: Oh, God.  
Ino!: This is what she did when we first met, except she did it just to find out how to change her text color.  
tipsyGnostalgic: alright  
tipsyGnostalgic: were gonna be some hotshit archivists  
tipsyGnostalgic: diggin through the ancient records that is the /help function  
zKazinski: We should look into utilizing the research functions more effectively.  
zKazinski: Let me try something.  
zKazinski: /help query ‘help’

Subject catalogue limited to subject ‘help’.

  
The mental space rapidly shrank, until it was only a few dozen entries on the same subject. Chris managed to follow Renick out of the door without looking too stupid.

Now able to see all the information clearly, Chris could tell that this was all information on effectively using the ‘help’ command. Variations, ways to manipulate the search tools. It implied massive libraries of commands, the majority of them locked off by the limited processing power.  


Ino!: Right, give me a turn. I know what we should do!  
zKazinski: Let me try a command first.  
zKazinski: /helpContent copyTo ‘save’

Contents of help query ‘help’ saved!  
zKazinski: Right, now you can go.  
Ino!: /help query ‘senses’

No results found!

Ino!: Damn it.

  
Chris could feel the information change, shifting from a large collection of ideas to an 'empty space'. More importantly, he could instantly recollect what the ‘/help’ menu had contained, just by thinking about it.  


zKazinski: Okay, so the ‘copyTo ‘save’’ function is useful.  
Kid_Win: What can we use it for?  
Ino!: Instantly memorizing information, if we can save messages.  
ModThunder: Try /lastMessage.  
Ino!: Thanks, Thunder.  
Ino!: Hello! Testing!  
Ino!: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’

Contents of last message saved!  
Ino!: Nice!  
tipsyGnostalgic: so now we can just build a database of useful things?  
Kid_Win: 2 * 2 = 4  
Kid_Win: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’

Contents of last message saved!  
Kid_Win: 2 * 3 = 6  
Kid_Win: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’

Contents of last message saved!  
ModThunder: /alerts ‘copyTo’ disable  
tipsyGnostalgic: thanks mt  
Ino!: Listen, I can see how that’s useful  
Ino!: But you’re filling my brain with MATH, and it’s DISGUSTING.

  
Chris understood, from the moment that he saw that he could perfectly memorize written information, that he finally had the opportunity to rid himself of his problem once and for all. For years he had struggled with managing math when tinkering, and the solution was right in front of him. It didn’t matter if the others were annoyed with it, because he (reasonably) concluded that they benefited too.  


Kid_Win: 2 * 4 = 8  
Kid_Win: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’  
Kid_Win: I understand how you feel!  
Kid_Win: That’s why I’m doing this now, so we can do whatever math we need on the fly.  
Kid_Win: It’s like a calculator in your brain, but better.  
Kid_Win: 2 * 5 = 10  
Kid_Win: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’  
tipsyGnostalgic: most of us can already do our 2’s instantly  
Kid_Win: Well I can’t! Give me some slack!  
Kid_Win: 2 * 6 = 12  
Kid_Win: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’  
zKazinski: Actually, this could be very useful. Get every number from one to thirty or so in multiplication, division, addition, and all that.  
zKazinski: I’ll help you fill out the mathematics.  
Kid_Win: 2 * 7 = 14  
Kid_Win: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’  
Ino!: Are you going to do all the combinations?  
Ino!: What are you going to do when you get to 4 times 2?  
Ino!: You already have 2 times 4.  
Kid_Win: 2 * 8 = 16  
Kid_Win: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’  
Kid_Win: Uh, just make a record anyway?  
Ino!: Okay, I can’t stop you, so I’m going to be in charge of this!  
Kid_Win: It’ll be useful?  
Ino!: We do all numbers up to 100!  
Ino!: For Kid Win, that’s 2 times 2 all the way to 2 times 100.  
Ino!: Roxy does the 3’s, from 3 times 2 to 3 times 100.  
tipsyGnostalgic: alright  
tipsyGnostalgic: im down for calculating shit out  
tipsyGnostalgic: usin my elite hacker knowhow  
Ino!: Zorian does 4’s and I do 5’s, and ModThunder does 6’s.  
ModThunder: Wait, what?  
Ino!: When we reach whatever our number is times 100, then we go to the next number that nobody’s doing and keep counting.  
ModThunder: Even me?  
zKazinski: 4 * 2 = 8  
zKazinski: /lastMessage copyTo ‘save’  
Ino!: If we all do this 20 times, we’ll all have a full multiplication table in our heads.  
Ino!: YOU THINK YOU CAN STAY IN OUR HEADS AND NOT PULL YOUR OWN WEIGHT?  
ModThunder: Alright!  
ModThunder: Fine!

  
That girl was bossy. Good thing that was exactly what the group needed right now.

❖

Ino spent a good twenty minutes trying to herd everyone into turning this into a perfect math power, because they kept getting distracted. Eventually, they all started working seamlessly, and had the table filled out within an hour. Zorian was keeping watch well enough to point out any time somebody made a mistake.

Afterwards, they agreed to do an addition table tomorrow and a subtraction table the day after, saving the division table for last.

It wasn't that she particularly cared for math - she actually hated it - but that was _exactly_ why this would be useful. She basically had to do each question only once, and then she’d never have to do it again. At some point, Kid Win mentioned using this as a foundation to memorizing entire tables of physics equations and predicting motion in real-time.

And _that_ got her interested, until Zorian pointed out they would have to be able to actually track distance and speed with their eyes to do that. Filled with spite, she loudly announced she’d learn that skill, too. It couldn't be that hard, after all.  


Kid_Win: Alright, I’m going to bed.  
Kid_Win: I’ve been up for hours doing math and getting interrogated, so I’m exhausted.  
Ino!: Goodnight!  
tipsyGnostalgic: night  
zKazinski: So what’s the plan for what else we can save?  
zKazinski: I’m tempted to save some spells.  
Ino!: We could try to learn each-other’s languages!  
zKazinski: I’m not sure how that could be useful.  
tipsyGnostalgic: i could rub it in dirks face that i can watch anime unsubbed  
tipsyGnostalgic: im in  
zKazinski: Let’s shelve this idea until we can do something more useful.  
zKazinski: Math is just about the only universal thing that we can all find a use for.  
zKazinski: That and the laws of motion.

  
In the physical world, she had taken to getting hand-to-hand combat pointers from Choji. He was a hefty guy, but his martial arts skills were the top in her team. While they spared, her sensei and Shikamaru lazily played shogi and the occasional game of Go.

Ino was starting to learn that the Node didn’t really give her much trouble with multitasking, if she put in a bit of effort. It wasn’t hard to hold two different conversations at once, so long as one of those conversations was in the Node. Most people wouldn’t notice how weird that is, but Ino was a Yamanaka, and the Yamanaka got brains in a way others don’t.

For starters, if she was having two conversations at once, then she would need to be able to be think of two different subjects at once. That would mean she was capable of thinking two subjects at once, so long as she was trying to talk about one of them in the Node. If somebody told her to write two essays on different topics, she would be able to write one on paper, and at the same time write the other in the Node.

She couldn’t help but wonder if this was a second mind, and if so, if this second mind was a valid mind for transferring into her enemies. It depended heavily on the difference between having two minds, or one mind doing twice as much. She would have to test it later, when Asuma-sensei wasn’t around to ask questions and when she had time to convince Shikamaru that letting her control his body was easier than him doing it for himself.  


Ino!: We could make guides to our skills, so that the others have access to them whenever they want.  
Ino!: One of us could study something like medicine, and we’d all benefit from the knowledge.  
zKazinski: Medicine is also universally applicable, nice catch.  
tipsyGnostalgic: i dunno  
tipsyGnostalgic: if your medicine relies on freaky healing potions made of magic shit id love to hear about it  
tipsyGnostalgic: but we might not all be able to use it  
zKazinski: General anatomy and mundane medicine, then?  
Ino!: I’ll ask around for some medic-nin to train me.  
tipsyGnostalgic: medic nin  
tipsyGnostalgic: u have ninja doctors  
tipsyGnostalgic: im glad we can just append ninja to the start of anythin and it be a real job  
tipsyGnostalgic: im gonna be a ninja chef  
Ino!: It’s a serious profession!  
Ino!: And we have those too!  
zKazinski: Math, physics, anatomy, and technology. Anything else we need to share?  
tipsyGnostalgic: i think thats everything

  
Choji was moving her through the motions of deflecting strong punches and taking the strikes she can’t block. Nobody hit hard enough as an academy student for her to learn this, but as a full member of Konohagakure’s military, she needed to know how to handle a proper punch.

Her taijutsu practice left bruises (ugly ones!) and she would be using makeup to hide them in the morning, but she wanted to be able to handle herself in a fight. At least, she had to be able to impress others with her ability to fight if she wanted to move forward politically, become a respected ninja, and win the heart of every man in the village.  


Ino!: Let’s move onto the next subject, then.  
Ino!: So how are we going to get more room in the Node?  
zKazinski: ModThunder said we can get more space by sharing things across our worlds, but never clarified what counts.  
zKazinski: Mind giving an explanation?  
ModThunder: Sure.  
ModThunder: When a Node connects to a context, it must reach into it. This connection is fragile and constantly under the stress of breaking.  
ModThunder: The Node can protect this connection, but it’s costly, and customized to each context.  
ModThunder: But where two contexts are made more similar to one another, some of the methods we use to stabilize the connection in one context start to apply to the other.  
ModThunder: If there’s a trick involving the metaphysics behind chakra to keeping the connection protected, and there’s even tiny amounts of chakra in the other worlds, that method applies to those other worlds.  
zKazinski: So if we can figure out how to transfer stuff through the existing Node connections, we might be able to free up space?  
ModThunder: Maybe!  
ModThunder: It depends on what you transfer.  
ModThunder: Exotic energies and matter are a nice, tangible unit of physical law.  
ModThunder: But things like pocket dimensions that follow the rules of another context are the optimal choice.  
Ino!: This is getting more complicated than I expected.

  
Choji threw a punch. She managed to block it, but the force sent her skidding backwards, digging her shoes into the mud.

Her arms stung, and at that point she called off the training. It was dark, she was tired, and she almost slipped in the wet grass. After a brief stretch, Ino let her team know she was heading home. Choji decided he was going to spend the night with Shikamaru, and Shikamaru made no effort to stop him.

As Ino started on her way home, she focused on the conversation in her head. She didn’t pay attention to her surroundings much, let alone the shadowy figure tailing her.

❖

Roxy, Dirk, Jake, and Jane had set off in search of Jake's First Gate. In total, there were seven Gates per world, each acting simultaneously as the end goal for conquering a region, and a way to travel between the various hub-worlds.

Actually conquering the First Gate would be key to accessing the other three Lands, but getting there was going to be difficult. The Land of Mounds and Xenon was rugged and hilly, and occasionally they would stumble across giant burial mounds that exploded with hordes of the undead when they got too close.  


tipsyGnostalgic: can you move the limit up a bit?  
tipsyGnostalgic: like up to 95 percent  
ModThunder: I’d love to, but no.  
ModThunder: Sometimes stuff happens that increases the strain on the connection, and the Node is forced above its cap temporarily.  
ModThunder: When the Node is running at over 100% capacity, it starts degrading rapidly.  
ModThunder: If something happens that spikes processing costs an additional 10%, the Node will start being damaged again.  
Ino!: Again?  
ModThunder: Go review the very first things that happened in the Node.  
ModThunder: Right at the start.  
ModThunder: Roxy’s connection is incredibly costly.  
tipsyGnostalgic: oh  
tipsyGnostalgic: callie had problems contactin me cuz of void shenanigans  
tipsyGnostalgic: its like a storm of void BS  
tipsyGnostalgic: ruinin my friendships n fuckin my brain wifi up the ass  
tipsyGnostalgic: in a way that ONLY a voidstorm can assfuck  
Ino!: Don’t do that.  
Ino!: Whatever that was, I don’t want to hear it EVER AGAIN.  
zKazinski: I don’t think that should be dignified with a response.  
zKazinski: But I do need to hear an explanation of ‘Void’.

  
In typical videogame fashion, the monsters had health-bars floating over their heads, and they were labeled. A pack of Ribrager Imps were lead by a single Bonehead Ogre, who was using his own severed arm as a club.

Jake was reloading his pistols, which meant it was Roxy’s turn to supply cover-fire. She started taking pot-shots, hoping to distract the imps. The two of them had been taking turns unloading shots on the crowd of monsters.

The issue wasn’t how dangerous these monsters were, but the fact that they lacked soft tissues meant that her team’s arrangement of two gun-wielders, a polearm user, and a sword user was relatively ineffective. That combined with the natural armor of the ogre and the way the imps kept trying to repair the ogre meant that it was an annoyingly tanky fight.

The ogre slammed its arm-club into Jane, and she went flying. Not much damage done, maybe some bruising. Dirk took the momentary distraction of the ogre watching his victim go flying to leap onto its ribcage and start slashing at its other arm.

Jake started aiming at the skull of the ogre, leaving little bulletholes through the bone. Roxy followed up his shots with carefully aimed strikes at the spine. It was doing damage, but she had half a mind to just charge in with her fists.  


tipsyGnostalgic: its like  
tipsyGnostalgic: my hero title  
tipsyGnostalgic: my class in SBURB  
zKazinski: That’s the ‘game’ you’re playing, right?  
tipsyGnostalgic: yeah  
tipsyGnostalgic: im the rogue of void  
tipsyGnostalgic: jakes the page of hope  
tipsyGnostalgic: janes the maid of life  
tipsyGnostalgic: dirks the prince of heart (lmfao)  
Ino!: ‘Void’ is a lot different from heart, hope, and life.  
Ino!: It sounds like you drew the best option, all brooding and cool.  
zKazinski: Do these hero titles give you any powers?  
tipsyGnostalgic: yea, but i have to unlock them  
tipsyGnostalgic: ill get invisibility and stealth shit

  
She wished she had stealth shit at this point. Several imps decided to charge the back line, drawing fire away from the ogre. Roxy managed to punch a bullethole through the neck of one imp, causing it to collapse into a pile of bones, and then disintegrate into a pile of collectables.

The rest of the imps were thoroughly pissed, though. They managed to move into close range and started slashing with bony claws. Roxy kept smacking them away with her gun's stock, hoping that Dirk and Jane could take out the ogre quickly enough to give them backup.

And that was when the Spinewrecker Giclops showed up, ripping its way out of the mound in a shower of dirt and stone. The ogre was a measly ten feet, compared to this monster’s fifteen. Its single eyehole looked over the fight, and it decided to charge Jane, who hadn’t quite made her way back to the ogre.

Roxy knew for a fact that Jane had the least action-packed childhood of the three of them, and she doubted she could handle the giclops on her own. She grabbed the nearest of the two imps harassing her, shoving her fingers into its empty eyeholes and ripping its skull from its body. She slammed the skull into the other imp, causing them both to explode into piles of colorful collectables, and started on a dead-sprint towards Jane.

A quick glance saw Dirk severing the ogre’s arm, and in a fluid motion he continued his attack to cut its skull in half, which he did from _inside the very skull he was cutting_. If he wasn't gay, she'd be all over him.  


Ino!: Useful!  
Ino!: I could teach you some ninja tricks, if you think it’ll help you out with your stealth stuff!  
tipsyGnostalgic: i mean, i use rifles, so i imagine most my stealth will be related to sniping  
Ino!: What’s a rifle?  
tipsyGnostalgic: oh, you dont have guns  
tipsyGnostalgic: do u have crossbows?  
tipsyGnostalgic: imagine the trigger from a crossbow on a pipe and that pipe explodes projectiles at people  
zKazinski: That’s pretty much exactly what a gun is.  
Ino!: So it’s a weapon that shoots explosions at people?  
zKazinski: It’s a weapon that uses explosives to shoot shrapnel at people.  
Ino!: And why is my world the one that’s not cool enough to have EXPLOSION CROSSBOWS?  
tipsyGnostalgic: theyre really loud  
tipsyGnostalgic: and youre a ninja  
Ino!: That SUCKS.

  
Roxy rushed up to Jane’s side, firing several shots into the giclops’ eye socket. It looked like the bullets bounced around in its skull rather than dealing damage. She readied for another shot when Jane yanked her out of the way of the giclops’ ground-slam attack.

Roxy quickly stashed her gun into her sylladex inventory, and prepared to take the Spinewrecker hand-to-hand. Jake was keeping the imps at bay with cover-fire, and Jane was wielding the giant green fork she created at Jake’s house.

Jane stabbed at the monster’s leg several times, causing the bone to crack, while Roxy kept it busy by dancing around its attacks and occasionally jumping up on its body to rip out ribs. On some unsaid cue, Jane jumped back to give the Dirk room to slash the damaged leg.

The creature collapsed, and suddenly Roxy, Jane, and Dirk all dog-piled onto it, trying to deal as much damage as possible before it could repair its stump. Jake continued to cover them by shooting at the imps as they tried to rush the group.

After a few seconds of smashing, wrenching, stabbing, and slashing at the behemoth creature, it collapsed into pickups. The imps fled, and the team started picking up the various gems and rewards from the fight. Roxy paid attention to the names of the resources as she gathered them. Collectively, it was called grist, and it was used to power the alchemy systems back at their houses.

From this fight, they had something like 100 Emerald, 40 Amethyst, 25 Iron, 500 Build Grist, and a few random esoteric types like a Zinc and a few Relic. That fight was a common random encounter, and it took all four of them to handle it. 500 Build Grist was _nothing_. It was the most basic type of material, and they got barely a drop of the stuff.

She just hoped they found a better way of handling grist problems, or they wouldn't even be able to craft enough food for them all.

❖

Zorian had been in the library for about an hour, researching anything related to time travel, and saving anything even vaguely useful to his private channel in the Node. He’d long since accepted that the Node was of alien origin and thus un-researchable, so he didn’t look into it in the library. He still firmly categorized the Node as ‘an issue’, but an understandable issue. It was part of a larger phenomenon, picking ‘exceptional’ people for an unknown purpose.

He at least _hoped_ that the Node was attracted to him for the time-travel. He’d be seriously pissed if he traveled through time and was only considered important because he was Daimen’s brother. Not that he could deny that being the younger brother of a famous mage and explorer would have factored into it.

The last day or so had been especially interesting with the Node. After explaining his situation, Roxy stated that something must be causing the ‘time loop’. Because Zorian went back in time even without dying, dying must not be the cause the of time travel, and as such whatever was causing it would continue to affect him until he did something to prevent it.

Likewise, his classmate Zach’s strange behavior and great magical skill during the first time through the month could be explained by him having been the previous time-traveler. Somehow that status had been transferred to Zorian when the lich used some sort of spell to end the time-loop.

That theory was the best they could put together with the knowledge they had, but Zorian was still trying to work out several problems with it, like where Zach had disappeared to after Zorian became the time-traveler.  


Ino!: Hey, Kid Win!  
Ino!: Design a gun for me!  
Kid_Win: What?  
Kid_Win: Why?  
Ino!: Well, you’re clearly the best person to ask if all you do is invent stuff all day.  
Kid_Win: I mean, I could make a gun for you, but how would I give it to you?  
Ino!: You’d send me the instructions.  
Kid_Win: Okay, but I don’t know what sorts of tools or materials you have access to.  
Kid_Win: And why do you suddenly want a gun?  
Ino!: Roxy uses guns, Zorian knows how to use a gun, you use guns.  
Kid_Win: I use laser guns.  
Ino!: I want a gun, too.  
Kid_Win: Sure, but you’ll have to finish up the addition tables.  
Ino!: UGH.  
Ino!: Fine, I’ll do it, I’ll message you in private.  
tipsyGnostalgic: hey kw  
Kid_Win: Yeah?  
tipsyGnostalgic: why are u still hidin ur real name if theres no way for us to reveal it to anybody?  
Kid_Win: I’m under orders to take caution with you guys for a while, until you can prove you’re actually from other universes.

  
Zorian switched his focus from the main group to one of their latest additions, a private channel. When they discovered that they could create multiple channels with their own rules, they each made a private channel, and Roxy set up a one on one channel for every pair of people.

He had his suspicions as to why she might have done this.  


Private Channel with tipsyGnostalgic  
tipsyGnostalgic: heeyyyyy  
tipsyGnostalgic: u arent too busy with nothin  
tipsyGnostalgic: r u?  
zKazinski: Not really, no.  
zKazinski: I’m just saving stuff from the library to my Node.  
tipsyGnostalgic: coolio  
tipsyGnostalgic: im just wanderin what its like being a wizard  
tipsyGnostalgic: like is doin’ spells hard?  
zKazinski: Yeah, it took a long time for me to even be able to sense my own mana, let alone shape it into spells.  
zKazinski: It’s not just about knowledge, it’s also about exercising your mana skills like muscles.  
tipsyGnostalgic: hm  
tipsyGnostalgic: im sure ur super mana-buff too  
tipsyGnostalgic: absolutely mana RIPPED

  
He still wasn’t sure what to do about this either. He was trying to ignore it for now, but she _was_ nice, if a bit weird. She seemed really impressed by his status as a mage-in-training, and he was tempted to explore why she liked that so much. All he would have to do is get her talking about wizards, which didn't seem particularly hard.  


zKazinski: Can I ask why you’re so interested in my career?  
zKazinski: It almost sounds like you wish you could be a mage.  
tipsyGnostalgic: well  
tipsyGnostalgic: let me tell you about my mom  
tipsyGnostalgic: back before my earth was destroyed  
tipsyGnostalgic: my mom was an author  
tipsyGnostalgic: she wrote a book series about wizards  
zKazinski: I can see how you would be attached to the concept, then.  
tipsyGnostalgic: but the story didnt get all that popular  
tipsyGnostalgic: mostly cause of its size n complexity  
tipsyGnostalgic: despite this she seemed to get super rich and famous ex nihilo  
tipsyGnostalgic: n weird things happened around her  
zKazinski: Such as?  
tipsyGnostalgic: recorded audio would cut out  
tipsyGnostalgic: spooky things would appear in the background of images with her  
tipsyGnostalgic: it was rumored she was involved with the occult  
tipsyGnostalgic: when the invasion started she fought back n paid with her life  
tipsyGnostalgic: considerin i went back in time to play the game  
tipsyGnostalgic: shes probably out there right now  
tipsyGnostalgic: fightin against the end

  
He didn’t know what to say about that. He wasn’t much to feel attachment to his family, but he could understand how it might be different if he had never met her.  


tipsyGnostalgic: hold up  
tipsyGnostalgic: i just got to my house  
tipsyGnostalgic: fuck  
tipsyGnostalgic: clown  
tipsyGnostalgic: ill be right back

zKazinski: Roxy is dealing with a clown situation, so she’ll be back soon.  
Kid_Win: A clown situation?  
zKazinski: I have no clue either.  
ModThunder: I wish I could have just gotten a normal Node.  
ModThunder: That girl is so much trouble.  
Ino!: Kid Win is helping me design a gun that uses chakra!  
Kid_Win: It’s a fascinating energy system, I’m going to love working with it in person.  
zKazinski: Assuming we ever get that far.  
Ino!: We’ll figure something out.  
Kid_Win: _Woah._  
Kid_Win: Hold up a moment.  
Kid_Win: I just found something while playing around with /help.  
Kid_Win: There’s a custom command scriptor!  
zKazinski: What does that mean?  
Kid_Win: We could make our own commands, so long as they only use the functions of other commands.  
Ino!: Then why would we use them if they just replicate what other commands do?  
Kid_Win: I just wrote something out in my private channel.  
Kid_Win: Behold!  
Kid_Win: Automation!  
Kid_Win: /addition ‘10000’

Opened temporary work channel ‘Math’!  
Generating messages…  
Messages generated!  
Posting messages to ‘Math’...  
Messages posted!  
Messages copied to ‘save’!  
Channel ‘Math’ has closed!

  
Zorian became aware of a new channel, it filling with thousands of posts over the span of a second, and then instantly closing. He checked his instant recollection abilities to see that it was filled to the brim with math, thousands of addition problems pre-solved and implanted into his mind.  


Kid_Win: _Boom._  
Kid_Win: We can now instantly add any number from 1 to 10000 with any other number in that range!  
Kid_Win: I’m working on the subtraction, multiplication, and division versions.  
zKazinski: Okay, this is useful.  
Kid_Win: It’s even better, because my power is playing nicely with it.  
Kid_Win: Which gives me good hopes for tinkering with chakra and mana.  
Ino!: Huh.  
Ino!: This gives me an idea!  
Ino!: There's a command I found when looking for stuff that might work with my clan techniques.  
Ino!: It lets you take a 'snapshot' of everything you sense in a moment, and save it.  
Ino!: /inputFlow copyTo 'save'

  
Zorian became aware of a second body, feeling what it feels. It wasn't moving; for all purposes it was trapped in time. Like Ino said, it was a snapshot of a single moment, the sounds she heard stretching out into a single long note and the little aches and pains in her body became much more notable through all the alien-ness of it. He couldn't look around the room she sat in, try as he might, as her eyes pointed at a mirror off in the distance. He could see her reflection, a young girl staring into her own eyes with a smile.  


Ino!: Do you think if we just had a command that constantly replaces the snapshot, we could share our senses?  
Kid_Win: You know what?  
Kid_Win: I'm already on it.

  



	4. Caring (Arc 1)

Kid_Win: The sense-sharing is based on the ‘save’ system.  
Kid_Win: Because each channel has its own save, I didn’t bother making a way to limit who you share your senses with.  
Kid_Win: So if you want to share your senses with somebody in private, just do /mindShare in your private channel.  
ModThunder: I like how this doesn’t use up processing power to achieve its goal, but I need to clarify something.  
ModThunder: Unlike the Blur service with a similar effect, inputFlow doesn’t come with metaphysical filtering.  
ModThunder: Basically, the information holds the same properties it would in the original cosmological context.  
tipsyGnostalgic: isnt info just info?  
tipsyGnostalgic: i dunno what special properties ur attributin to facts  
ModThunder: Let’s say that your cosmological context has a word that, by some metaphysical capability intrinsic to the word, causes your death shortly after you learn it.  
ModThunder: If you hear the word, not only will you die, but the property of the word that causes your death will be transferred to your allies as well.  
ModThunder: But if that information is delivered from outside your context, where the word is safe, it will not hold this property.  
ModThunder: If somebody said the killing word to one of your teammates, you would react as though you had learned the word in a world where it doesn’t kill you, and thus be fine.  
tipsyGnostalgic: oh  
tipsyGnostalgic: huh  
Kid_Win: Zorian, if somebody tries to cast _Power Word: Kill_ on you, please stop them.  
zKazinski: I have never heard of such a spell.  
zKazinski: The words used in spellcasting don’t have any intrinsic power.  
zKazinski: What do you mean by ‘Blur’?  
ModThunder: Blur was one of the services I disabled. It deals in creating coherency through indistinction.  
ModThunder: With it, you could do things like share your powers or senses by becoming more conceptually alike.  
zKazinski: As useful as that sounds, I’d prefer to remain as me.  
tipsyGnostalgic: so r we gonna do this?  
tipsyGnostalgic: im rdy for some people to climb into my brain  
tipsyGnostalgic: experience ROXYVISION  
Kid_Win: Okay, let's do it then.

  
Chris held his breath. 'Testing' wasn't really a common phase in the tinker workcycle. He more-or-less threw this together, but he was good enough at code to know that a loop repeating the same simple command didn't have a lot of chance for failure. Frankly, the math command was harder. ModThunder thought this command wouldn't be dangerous, and that was the only reason he was skipping straight to using it. 

Kid_Win: Sharing perspective in 3… 2… 1...  
Kid_Win: /mindShare on

  
Zorian, Ino, and Roxy became aware of a second presence, a body other than their own. Zorian and Roxy could for the first time contextualize how _different_ another body felt. They could feel the slight ache in his right wrist, and the way his back was stiffened from leaning over a worktable all day. Ino brushed this all off, already aware of the way another body could feel. They saw he was in a lab, with parts scattered all around him. He was focused on painting the plastic case for his new weapon, and just to test the sense he tapped the paintbrush to his finger, letting the cold paint sit on his skin before wiping it away with a wet-wipe. 

Ino!: Hell yeah! Let’s do this!  
Ino!: /mindShare on

  
Roxy, Kid Win, and Zorian all recognized Ino’s senses the moment they became available. With three reference points to work from, Roxy and Zorian both started picking out all the little differences in how the bodies felt, while Kid Win got to experience the world from another’s eyes for the first time. Ino's long hair was a new experience for him, and he couldn't help but notice the way it swayed and lightly tugged her scalp when she turned her head. 

tipsyGnostalgic: get rdy to experience my BOMBASTIC body  
tipsyGnostalgic: /mindShare on

  
Now in the swing of things, nobody was particularly surprised when they found Roxy’s body in their awareness. It was becoming easier to just accept the presence, so none of them reacted strongly to suddenly seeing through her eyes. She was in her room, which was filled with stuffed animals and decorated with strange cat-like creatures frozen in resin. There were a few empty bottles laying around, and some strange pieces of technology, but nothing so fancy looking as Kid Win's lab. 

zKazinski: /mindShare on  
zKazinski: I was really expecting to feel something weird.  
zKazinski: Don’t let me forget if it’s on.

  
With Zorian, everything was in order. At first, there was some discomfort. Not in the form of pain, but in the lack of control. Seeing through another pair of eyes made them want to look around through them, but not being able to control the direction the eyes were pointing was a bit frustrated.

Ino was taking it all in stride while everyone else struggled. After a few minutes of letting them adjust to it, Ino decided to give a rundown on the general etiquette of sharing senses with somebody else. It was something the Yamanaka had instilled into her from the moment she began training with her clan’s techniques, and she felt comfortable giving out the basics.

Ino!: Alright!  
Ino!: So the first thing is…  
Ino!: DON’T THINK ABOUT EACH OTHER’S PRIVATE PARTS.  
Ino!: Don't acknowledge them.  
Ino!: Don't even think about them.  
Ino!: It’s now officially COMPLETELY taboo and it’ll only make things weird.  
tipsyGnostalgic: o my GOD  
Kid_Win: I feel like I'm getting The Talk from a preteen.  
Ino!: Seriously, I'm not joking.  
Ino!: Roxy has a chest, you boys have… your things…  
Ino!: And it's going to feel weird, but let's not make this awkward.  
Kid_Win: The shutdown command is /mindShare off.  
Kid_Win: Use it liberally.  
Kid_Win: As cool as you guys are, I'm not ready to take a shower with you.  
Ino!: Thanks, KW.  
Ino!: Up next: Food!  
Ino!: We won't all have the same tastes in the stuff.  
Ino!: Don't complain when somebody eats something you don't like, but I want to try food from other worlds without getting fat.  
Ino!: I fully intend to live all my food fantasies through you while I stick to my diet.  
Kid_Win: Fair.  
Ino!: That said, I will complain about your music choices, KW.

  
Kid Win snorted. He had some Pop channel playing on the radio while he worked. It was crystal clear tinkertech surround sound, and nothing less would be accepted in his workplace, ever. _Even if_ he got distracted dancing in his seat sometimes, tinkering music was mandatory. Roxy had taken to silently bobbing her head to the music he was playing, not minding the weird looks she was getting from Jane and the pink ghost next to her.

Fefetasprite was Roxy’s newest companion, made from two dead alien girls with a shared love of nature, animal puns, and being generally goofy. At first, when the weird clown alien threw their mangled corpses into the kernelsprite, everybody freaked out. Even if her creation wasted a revive, Roxy deemed the resultant companion ‘totes worth it’, and Fefetasprite didn’t seem to mind her situation much either. The others in the Node were still getting used to the sight of her.

tipsyGnostalgic: watch urself  
tipsyGnostalgic: au katy perry aint bad  
Kid_Win: At least _somebody_ here has taste.  
Kid_Win: You also owe us some authentic sushi, Ino.  
Kid_Win: I don't set up sense-sharing for free.  
Ino!: Konohagakure isn't anywhere near the coast.  
Ino!: Our fish isn't that great.  
Kid_Win: I don’t care.  
Kid_Win: It can’t be worse than ABB money laundering sushi.  
zKazinski: What's sushi?  
Kid_Win: Don't say what I think you're going to say.  
tipsyGnostalgic: raw fish  
Kid_Win: _That_ is a _vast oversimplification_ of a _culinary art_!  
Kid_Win: They _actually_ catch a fish and take a bite out before throwing it back in.  
tipsyGnostalgic: lmao  
zKazinski: I see that your worlds have firmly mastered cooking.  
zKazinski: An actual explanation, please?

  
While Ino and Kid Win launched into an explanation on sushi, Zorian heard somebody knock on his door. He complained about how a girl named Taiven always managed to track him down to go dungeon delving in the previous two iterations of the month, and he was certain that she was appearing for exactly that reason today. He gave death-glare as he opened the door.

“Hey, Roach!”

She held her smile despite the harsh look on his face, and pushed past him to make her own way into the room.

“What do you need, Taiven?”

Ino!: Your language sounds so weird.  
Kid_Win: I’d do it.  
Kid_Win: If our theory that this a Groundhog Day loop is accurate, then you aren’t in serious danger.  
zKazinski: We haven’t strictly proven that it’s a loop.  
zKazinski: We just know that an unknown factor is causing the time travel, and that nothing I’ve done in two times through the month has prevented me from going back.  
zKazinski: I don’t want to take the risk of doing something that might prevent me from going back.  
tipsyGnostalgic: if ur THAT afraid of butterflyin urself out of existence  
tipsyGnostalgic: takin pretty much any action might end up causing ur loop to end  
tipsyGnostalgic: but u were picked for the node  
tipsyGnostalgic: and im sure if ur situation was that delicate that wouldnt have happened  
Ino!: Yeah!  
ModThunder: It would have been accounted for in our metrics for picking exceptional individuals, so I can say the theory likely holds water.  
zKazinski: Wow.  
zKazinski: Thanks for staying on my side, Thunder.  
tipsyGnostalgic: was that a JOKE?  
tipsyGnostalgic: its like i dont even kno you anymore  
zKazinski: I’m still going to turn down her offer.  
Ino!: Fine, but you have to do it next time through the month.  
Ino!: I want to see this dungeon.  
zKazinski: Alright, fine.  
zKazinski: Just let me spend this month in peace.

  
Taiven had just finished making her proposition at this point. In short, she was supposed to only take this job as a team of four, and Zorian was her first choice for somebody who was smart enough to handle himself and not jeopardize everything. She spent much of the talk detailing how he would be _totally safe_ because they would both be going only to the highest levels, and because her team would be there to protect him.

The offer still wasn’t worth taking, not when he couldn’t protect himself yet. He decided he might give it a shot next time through the month, but he wasn’t ready for that yet.

After finally kicking her out of the room, he checked on what the others were doing.

Roxy was in her house with her friend and the ghostly creature she had identified as her sprite. They were idly chatting, going through her food supplies and writing down the strange codes associated with the items. Apparently, knowing these codes was enough to recreate the items with alchemical resources. Or whatever passed for alchemy in her world, at least.

Kid Win was still working on his latest project, a floating gun platform which he was tentatively calling the ‘Hyper Cannon’. He didn’t know enough about how it would end up to decide on its name yet. Roxy was at a loss for anything related to mechanical engineering, but whenever he switched over to the computational device to input instructions into his creation, she would immediately start offering advice.

Ino was digging through a huge bin of sharp weapons for star-shaped throwing blades. Apparently, ninja weapons were sold in bargain bins when they started to dull. Keeping dozens of weapons sharp was more effort than it was worth, so most ninja just sold their dull weapons back to stores to be sharpened or melted down. This particular store decided there was a market for people buying those used blades, and Ino embraced it fully.

Ino!: They don’t have to be sharp if you throw them hard enough.

  
Kid Win said that she wouldn’t be digging through the bargain bin if she hadn’t spent all of her money on a wardrobe expansion. When the resulting argument finally died down, Roxy had taken to doing a wardrobe expansion of her own, using the computerized alchemy system in the game.

She could take any almost any item in her inventory system, which she had described as a piece of matter-digitalization technology, and get a unique serial code from it. This code could be reduced into a series of holes punched into a card. She could then generate two new codes by putting two codes on the same card, or overlapping two cards so only the holes they shared would be read by the system. From this method, any two objects could craft another pair of objects, typically by granting one of the pair many of the properties of the other.

Unfortunately, crafting these items came with some downsides. The items cost more grist the more powerful they were. As if that wasn’t already enough of a problem, Roxy had also found she had a limit to the amount of grist she could carry at once. While there was a shared bank of grist that slowly refilled depleted grist types to her and her teammates, many recipes cost more grist than the game would allow her to carry on her at a time.

So Roxy just spent her resources on different outfits. They made goofy hats, cute dresses, and the bushiest fake moustache that she and Jane could manage. It was totally awesome.

In between Kid Win’s bouts of lament at his lack of access to both Zorian’s and Roxy’s alchemy systems, he was preparing to head out on a patrol. While he was being held out of school for the duration of the quarantine, the PRT didn’t want to risk his absences from school being linked to him not appearing publicly as a Ward.

They decided they’d put him out on a few patrols with a full Protectorate hero and a few other Wards. He slipped his visor on and stepped out of his lab, where his traveling companions were waiting for him. His teammates, Vista and Gallant, were standing in the hallway in front of his lab.

“Hey, KW,” Gallant said, “Miss Militia is waiting for us in the garage, we’ll be taking a van to the Boardwalk and doing a route through there. It should take about an hour or two.”

Kid Win could see Vista looked somewhat annoyed at that. She understood as well as he did that a patrol on the Boardwalk meant that it would be meant more as a public showing than any attempt at actually fighting crime. He knew that Vista dealt with this a lot, because she was twelve and the PRT didn’t want her getting involved in many fights. He suspected that they also wanted to keep him out of trouble during his quarantine.

The patrol was long and boring. Roxy wasn’t doing much, Zorian was in the library reading books in another language, and Ino was sitting in front of her mirror across from the bed, trying on jewelry and idly chatting about the colors.

A few minutes into Kid Win’s route, there was a knock at Ino’s door, and he turned his attention to her.

When she called out that he could come in, her dad made his way into the room. There was a tired look in his eyes; he had been in meetings all day long and only just got home in time for dinner. Ino didn’t know what all the meetings were about, but she knew it must be something big.

“Hey Princess, are you doing alright?”

“I’m doing well!” She gave him a smile.

“You’ve been quiet lately.” That was relative to how quiet she usually was. “Has something happened?”

She went still. Even with her enhanced ability to multitask in regards to the Node, she was still spending lots of time focusing on it to the exclusion of other things.

“Uh, no.” She let the conversation lull for a moment, and immediately began to regret it. The silence was awkward and gave them too much time to think. “There’s nothing to worry about.” She gave a meek smile.

tipsyGnostalgic: hey ino whats goin on  
Ino!: My dad is worried for me.

  
“I see. Is it a boy?” 

Ino!: NO.  
Ino!: ABORT! ABORT!  
Ino!: ANYTHING BUT THIS.  
tipsyGnostalgic: whats he askin?

  
Her expression stayed the same. Probably too 'the same': her eyes unblinking and her smiled becoming pained.

“Don’t be silly, daddy! Sasuke is the _only_ boy for me, and he still hasn’t seen the good thing right in front of him yet.”

Ino!: HE WANTS TO KNOW IF I HAVE A BOYFRIEND!  
tipsyGnostalgic: do u????  
Ino!: NO!

  
His face radiated amusement. He probably only believed her on the principle of her being his little angel. “I see. Well, if you do have boy troubles, just let me know and I’ll deal with them for you.” By ‘boy troubles’, he meant any boy she didn’t like looking in her direction in the best case and any boy _he_ didn’t like looking in her direction in the worst case. With that, he turned to leave. 

tipsyGnostalgic: then whats the prob?  
Ino!: First of all, he knows I'm keeping something from him.  
Ino!: Second of all, I don't want to talk to him about BOYS! He's my dad!  
zKazinski: You only talk about one boy.  
Kid_Win: One boy we haven't met yet.  
zKazinski: You talk about him enough that I’m sure your dad already knows about him.  
Kid_Win: Anyways, you still need to ask him if he knows anything about sealing for me.  
Ino!: Oh, right!

  
“Hey, daddy? I was wondering if I could learn fuinjutsu.”

He gave a thoughtful ‘hm’.

“Fuinjutsu? That’s unexpected. What has you so curious about sealing? It doesn't seem to fit my little Ino's attitude.”

_Think fast, Ino!_

“Well, my team is a dedicated live-capture team. Just like you and Choji and Shikamaru’s dads were-”

“Just like we are. Your old man isn’t retired yet.” He _always_ insisted that, but they both knew that he spent more time in administrative positions than actually on the field. Same with the Hokage, and a huge number of the village's other top ninja.

Ino continued through his objections. “- and isn’t fuinjutsu good for catching people? Restraining chakra, holding them prisoner, and stuff like that? And Shikamaru keeps running out of explosive tags.”

He smiled. “I think that is an _excellent_ idea. I’ll find some books on the subject for you. Just don’t let your studies and team get in the way of you and your new boyfriend.” The smiled turned into a grin.

“ _Dad!_ ”

She threw a pillow at him, but the door was already closed and he was gone.

Ino!: Okay, Kid.  
Ino!: He’ll help us.  
Ino!: But how am I going to keep this a secret if I can't even go two days without people noticing something’s different?  
tipsyGnostalgic: whys it gotta b a secret?  
tipsyGnostalgic: i told all my friends  
Ino!: Because of ninja things.  
Kid_Win: Which ‘ninja things’? You already know what happened when I told the PRT about you guys.  
Ino!: I don't know! Ninja things!  
Ino!: I'm a genin fresh out of the academy, don’t ask me.  
Ino!: But this isn't the sort of thing you share in the ninja world.  
Ino!: I told Shikamaru and Choji, and they know how to keep their mouths closed when it matters.  
Ino!: But I just met Asuma-sensei!  
Ino!: And my dad answers directly to the Hokage!  
Kid_Win: You've always talked about the Hokage as though he's this really nice grandfatherly type.  
Kid_Win: Why would you hide it from him?  
Ino!: Because I’m a Yamanaka!  
Ino!: I can't-  
Ino!: No, WE can't allow for anybody else to have mental techniques like ours.  
Ino!: It would permanently damage our reputation.  
Ino!: We get hundreds of clients each year specifically looking for the services of the Yamanaka. We’re the ONLY mind-readers in the world.  
Ino!: What would happen if word got out of a non-Yamanaka mind technique user?  
Kid_Win: I see.  
Kid_Win: Okay, but you could still tell a few trusted people, right?  
Ino!: I _have_ done that. My team knows.  
Ino!: I’m not stupid.  
Ino!: And how do I know it doesn’t get sent straight to the Intelligence division?  
Ino!: What did the Parahuman Response Team do when you mentioned your situation?  
Kid_Win: Uh.  
Kid_Win: They interviewed me for several hours and I’m still in quarantine.  
Ino!: Our interrogation department is called the Torture and Interrogation department.  
Kid_Win: Okay, I understand your perspective.  
tipsyGnostalgic: i get that ur worried  
tipsyGnostalgic: n ill totally help u keep it a secret  
tipsyGnostalgic: just keep in mind that lettin some other ppl know might not be as bad as u think????  
Ino!: Okay.  
Ino!: I’ll CONSIDER it.  
Ino!: Can we talk about something else?  
zKazinski: Yeah, I have an idea that’s worth looking into.  
Ino!: What is it?  
zKazinski: Thunder, can you go over the differences between our sense sharing command, and the one that is built-in to Blur?  
ModThunder: Sure.  
ModThunder: Your command is based on /inputFlow, which we used heavily while testing the Prime Hub.  
ModThunder: It takes information directly from one context to another, but in that process, the information acts as though it did in the original context.  
ModThunder: The '/blur Sensation’ command doesn’t transmit information directly, but it instead wears down the conceptual borders between the user’s senses.  
ModThunder: It’s less as though you experienced the information in the other person's context, and more like you experienced it inside the Node.  
zKazinski: Could we reduce the strain on the Node by transmitting information with special properties through the Node?  
ModThunder: Theoretically you could, but only if that information can be somehow used to optimize the Node’s connection.  
tipsyGnostalgic: so we’d have 2 have some super strong info?  
ModThunder: Yes, pretty much.  
ModThunder: Information that can do _something_ just from viewing or otherwise sensing it.  
zKazinski: There are monsters that can do magic with nothing but eye contact, but I’m not risking that.

  
Roxy looked over to Fefetasprite. The troll-ghost-fusion had taken off her long ghostly jacket, and was examining her shirt.

“Hey Roxy, isn’t it weird that I got Nepeta’s features on one side of my face, and Feferi’s features on the other, but my shirt is sleeveless on both sides? Only Feferi was wearing a sleeveless shirt before we were combined, so I should have one t-shirt sleeve and one strap! It’s pawsitively confounding!”

“Fefeta, you ask all the _most_ important questions. But I gots a question with absolutely _worldshakin’_ importance for you. Well, the question is of worldshakin’ importance to me. I think for you it’s just gonna be another q.”

“Oh reel-y? Whale, I’m sure I can answer lots of questions for you!”

“Is there any information with like, metaphysical or cosmological significance?”

“Yes, but I’m not suppawsed to just give it out to you! You’ve gotta go out and learn it for yourself. Or, that’s what I’m meant to say as your sprite and guide to the game. As your _friend_ , I want to help you, but you’ll have to ask more specific questions than that.”

“Oh, no, I mean like. Information that has special powers. Like the knowledge itself does stuff.”

Fefetasprite got a huge grin on her face. “Oh, I know the purr-fect thing! Fraymotifs! A Fraymotif is a pattern that commands the powers of the Aspects for a combat ability. When I was Nepeta, me and Equius used to do all sorts of Fraymotifs together, so I know lots of Heart/Void Fraymotifs that you and Dirk could do!”

Kid Win stopped talking with the others in the Node, and started paying attention to what Roxy was doing. He didn’t understand what Roxy’s sprite was going on about, but he recognized the importance in what she was saying.

“Holy shit, really? So we get cool elemental combo-spells n’ shit?”

“They aren’t quite spells, but they’re purrty mystical! You only have to know the Fraymotif and be attuned to the right Aspect to use it! So if you learn Oblivion Waltz, you can share that knowledge with Dirk so that you can use the Fraymotif as a team! I could teach you a whole bunch of Fraymotifs that you can do with Dirk, plus a few you can do with Jane!”

Fefetasprite gave a thoughtful look.

“Come to think of it, I could probably do my Heart/Life Fraymotifs with myself! I’ll try it soon, but first I should probably teach you everything I can. Ready?”

Instead of waiting for a response, Fefetasprite reached out and tapped Roxy on the forehead. A rush of information flowed through her being. She saw, but could not comprehend, Void, twisting emptiness, insignificance, and yielding. She saw, but could not comprehend, Heart, the ways of love, the self, and eternity.

The knowledge combined and shifted inside her mind until it settled in the form of her new Fraymotifs. They were strange, like music, metaphysics, and philosophy combined into a weave of Void and Heart.

The ghostly fish/cat girl was smiling knowingly. “Pretty neat, huh? A lot of Heart/Void stuff is status effects, but there are also some defensive options! We can practice later, after my catnap!”

Kid_Win: Dude.  
Kid_Win: What the fuck.  
Ino!: Woah.  
tipsyGnostalgic: u felt that too?  
zKazinski: This is _really_ interesting.  
zKazinski: You can just invoke this knowledge to create effects?  
tipsyGnostalgic: fefeta says anybody can use them so long as one of them is aligned with heart and one is aligned with void  
tipsyGnostalgic: i dont think you guys count ‘cause ur not from my universe  
zKazinski: Okay, so we now have something we can use.  
zKazinski: That was incredibly weird, but we have something.  
ModThunder: I’m going through the diagnostics as we speak.  
ModThunder: It seems like ‘Void’ might have some useful properties for piercing through the borders between cosmological contexts.  
tipsyGnostalgic: ur damn right it does!!  
tipsyGnostalgic: i have the BEST fuckin aspect that ever did get haved  
tipsyGnostalgic: u remember the voidstorm?  
tipsyGnostalgic: thats me  
tipsyGnostalgic: im the voidstorm  
tipsyGnostalgic: board up the windows bitches cuz im rollin in  
zKazinski: Right, thank you for this analysis of the situation.  
tipsyGnostalgic: *wink* *wink* *wonk*  
zKazinski: I was talking to Thunder there, not you Roxy.  
tipsyGnostalgic: :’(  
tipsyGnostalgic: brb cryin

  


❖

A few hours later, Ino had met with her team, and made their way to a different training ground than usual. Their compatriots in Team Eight were meeting with them for a group training session. Ino suspected that their team leaders only organized the event because they had the hots for each other. It was easy to poke fun at Asuma and his ‘hot new girlfriend’.

They made their way down a winding road through the tall forests, and eventually approached the clearing, where the others waited for them. Team Eight was a tracking and investigation team, comprised of Shino Aburame, Kiba Inuzaka, and Hinata Hyūga. Each of them had abilities that aided in tracking runaways or locating traps. The Inuzaka trained ninja hounds, the Hyūga could see through solid objects, and the Aburame commanded swarms of insects. Their team was lead by Kurenai Yūhi, a master illusionist.

tipsyGnostalgic: so r any of these boys this sasuke boy u like so much?  
Ino!: No! Ew! Why would I be interested in dog-boy or bug-boy?  
tipsyGnostalgic: i dont get ur taste in men  
tipsyGnostalgic: u talk about brooding n mysterious and yet mr sunglasses over there is off the table?  
Ino!: That's different.  
Ino!: He's not mysterious.  
Ino!: He's just weird.  
tipsyGnostalgic: not mysterious huh?????  
tipsyGnostalgic: tell me one fact about him  
Ino!: Uh.  
Ino!: He likes bugs?  
tipsyGnostalgic: hmmm  
tipsyGnostalgic: HMMMMMMMM  
tipsyGnostalgic: why tho?  
Ino!: I don't know!  
Ino!: Bugs are gross!  
tipsyGnostalgic: so hes…….. A MYSTERY???  
Kid_Win: You walked right into that one, Ino.  
Kid_Win: But enough of that.  
Kid_Win: You said you’d give us a demonstration of elite ninja fighting today.  
Ino!: Right!  
Ino!: I have the perfect plan, watch and learn.

  
“Hey, Kiba! When we do team spars, you're going down!”

The Kiba whipped around to look at her. His face turned into a scowl, and the small dog on his head yipped angrily.

“Oh yeah? I'll have you know Akamaru and me can take down all three of you!”

“Yeah, right! I bet you’re just afraid to admit you'd get beat by a _girl_!”

Shikamaru looked at Ino with mild curiosity.

Kiba almost literally barked with laughter. “There's no way I'd lose to you!” Ino ‘subtly’ elbowed Shikamaru, and that was all he needed to know his part in her plan. He wouldn’t be happy to be part of any plan that required more than a token non-effort, but he wouldn’t turn down a chance to complain about Ino without repercussions.

“I don't know, Ino. I don't think there's a chance you can win, especially given how much faster boys are.” The bait was set. Ino was still tempted to smack the back of his head, but she restrained herself. The fact that she _didn’t do anything_ didn’t go unnoticed.

Kurenai looked at Asuma. “Asuma, what have you been teaching these kids? They’re young, and should be taught better than this! I know for a _fact_ that you know better.”

Everybody turned towards Kurenai.

“Listen!” They all turned to Asuma, as though they were watching the accusation fly out to hit him. “I never taught him any of that! And I don't agree with him, but there _are_ less women ninja and-”

“Oh, that’s the angle you’re playing? And we aren't as fast, either? Kids, stand back, I think a bit of a demonstration is in order.”

Everybody backed away, standing in off to one side.

Ino!: Enjoy the show!

  
Kurenai immediately opened with a barrage of shuriken. At least twenty shuriken in a single throw, flying towards one man. He leapt back, dropping his lit cigarette and moving his hands in a weave of strange gestures. 

Ino!: These are handseals, they’re a big part of how ninjutsu is performed.  
zKazinski: Interesting. Very different from the gestures in spells.  
zKazinski: Does ninjutsu require vocalization?

  
“Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!” yelled Asuma, as he summoned a giant gale of wind that redirected the projectiles back at the woman who threw them. 

Ino!: Nope.  
zKazinski: So what is he yelling?  
Ino!: The name of the technique.  
tipsyGnostalgic: im so happy to hear that people do that on ur world  
tipsyGnostalgic: UNSPEAKABLY happy

  
Kurenai responded by dodging. Unlike her, a blast of wind couldn't aim its shots, and avoiding damage was pathetically easy. She began performing her own series of gestures, while Asuma drew two wicked blades that wrapped around his hands like knuckledusters. The blades glowed with a faint blue light, and he charged at her.

She finished her technique and dodged to the left. He swerved to the right, and slashed at the air.

“He can’t hear you right now, so I’m going to tell you kids in Team Ten that Asuma doesn't always know best. You should really consider your enemies as valid threats no matter what their gender is.”

Ino!: Kurenai is a master of illusions.  
Kid_Win: Do they only target one person at a time?  
Ino!: The fact that we can see what’s really happening is a sign that she _wants_ us to see what’s happening.

  
Suddenly Asuma whipped around to throw his dagger at where Kurenai was actually standing, forcing her to drop to the ground under the blade. The blade kept going, and passed through a tree near the edge of the clearing.

“Can’t hear you, huh? And I never taught them otherwise.”

She raised an eyebrow, urging him to continue talking. He must have caught what she was so curious about, because he immediately launched into an explanation. “I did a sealless release. I recognized the jutsu you were about to use and decided I might have a chance of dispelling it.”

She threw another volley of shuriken, which he easily dodged. “Good gamble, maybe I should take the kiddie gloves off.”

Ino!: They’re holding back.  
zKazinski: How can you tell?  
Ino!: Except for the knife throw, this is how hard Asuma fights when he’s training us.  
Kid_Win: It’s still really impressive.

  
Kurenai ran through another series of handseals, and Asuma charged her with the glowing dagger. Suddenly, a dozen of Kurenai were moving in different directions.

Asuma started slashing through the clones. One by one, they began bursting into clouds of smoke, and he was leaping from clone to clone in a wild flurry. Eventually, there was only one left. He looked around confused, like he couldn't see the original Kurenai at all. She strolled up to him and kicked him in the gut, causing him to buckle over.

The light in front of him shimmered briefly, undoing an illusion and revealing that his combat vest had a shuriken embedded in it right where Kurenai kicked. The shuriken had been pushed deep into his vest by the force of the kick, not far enough to break skin, but enough to show that she _could have_ taken him out of the fight in that moment.

Kid_Win: When did she do _that_?  
Ino!: Hm.  
Ino!: I bet it was during the second group of shuriken she threw!  
Ino!: We didn’t even see any of them hit, and obviously neither did Asuma.

  
Kiba started whooping and hollering at Kurenai’s victory. The bug-user Shino was completely stoic, and that left the normally shy Hinata as the one on her team to speak up.

“I don’t mean to be a bother, but what were you doing with those daggers, Asuma-sensei?”

He turned and gave her a smile, not particularly bothered by his defeat. “There are my chakra-conductive knives. They’re made from a special metal that conducts the power through them, which enhances the metal and the strength of the attacks. In my case, I use Wind chakra to increase their cutting power.”

Hinata nodded, her curiosity apparently satiated. Ino quickly relayed this new information to everyone.

Kid_Win: We need to figure out how that’s made if I’m ever going to tinker with chakra.  
Kid_Win: Wires made of this material could be useful.  
tipsyGnostalgic: already tryin to replace electricity with ninja magic?

  
“Hey Asuma-sensei, if you had a big bunch of chakra conductive wires, could you channel Lightning chakra through them to zap people?” Ino asked as Asuma started making his way to where his thrown dagger had gone.

“I suppose you could. Why?”

Ino!: I just asked Asuma if you could zap people with lightning chakra in wires, and he said yes.  
Kid_Win: I can _totally_ use that.  
Kid_Win: I’m sold on this chakra stuff.

  
“It sounds cool.”

“Ha! If you ever start fighting like that, I’d love to see it.” Asuma called back to her as he pulled his knife free from the fifth and final tree in the line of devastation it wrought. Ino looked at the damage, giving the others a moment to soak it in with her.

tipsyGnostalgic: oooohhh wow  
tipsyGnostalgic: sharpest fuckin knife ive ever seen  
zKazinski: So, let’s discuss that fight and what we learned from it.  
tipsyGnostalgic: ninja yell their attack names  
zKazinski: I still don’t understand why anybody would do that.  
Kid_Win: The handseals, what are up with those?  
Ino!: I don’t know the exact science, but it has to do with controlling the way chakra moves through your body.  
Ino!: Sometimes, people can get good enough chakra control that they can do techniques without relying on handseals.  
Ino!: That’s what Asuma did to dispel the illusion on him.  
zKazinski: Similar things can be done with magic.  
tipsyGnostalgic: they were sneaky the whole fight  
tipsyGnostalgic: even ur sensei dude was trying to trick her into thinking the illusion got him  
tipsyGnostalgic: they didnt treat range like most ppl would in a fight either  
tipsyGnostalgic: they were movin so fast that melee range and shuriken range werent super distinctive  
Ino!: I could tell the difference!  
tipsyGnostalgic: id have to see more ninja fights to learn what was goin on  
Kid_Win: I saved a few cool moments in a private channel.  
Kid_Win: I’ll transfer them over if anybody wants to see.  
zKazinski: Speaking of transferring saves.  
zKazinski: I know none of you can read the books I’ve been digging through for the past few hours, but I saved some information on spell formula that might be useful.  
zKazinski: Well, several books of information.  
zKazinski: I think when we can start sharing energy, this will be a crucial guide to using mana for your projects, Kid.  
Kid_Win: Mwahahaha!  
Kid_Win: My evil scheme comes together!  
ModThunder: Perfect time for this subject to come up!  
ModThunder: I just finished the optimizations on the Node, which should allow us to open an unanchored Node connection.  
Kid_Win: _Excellent_.  
tipsyGnostalgic: is it rly perfect timing if weve been talking about this nonstop for the past few hours?  
Ino!: Hell yeah!  
tipsyGnostalgic: like u woulda lost a coinflip more often than find a bad time to bring this up  
zKazinski: What are you waiting for?  
zKazinski: Set it up!  
ModThunder: /node status 1

Systems stable  
Core at 88.1% ~  
Node Population: 5  
User Count: 4  
Realm Count: 4  
Page 1/6

ModThunder: Take a long look at these numbers.  
ModThunder: /node setDefaultRules ‘MTPrivateChannel/optimizationsVoidV1’

Default Rules updating…  
Done.  
Applying rules…  
Done.

tipsyGnostalgic: so what did it do?  
ModThunder: This.  
ModThunder: /node status 1

Systems stable  
Core at 82.1% ˇ  
Node Population: 5  
User Count: 4  
Realm Count: 4  
Page 1/6

tipsyGnostalgic: nice  
ModThunder: Here we go!  
ModThunder: /node setConnection {‘Realm1’, ‘Realm2’, ‘Realm3’, ‘Realm4’} point(freeFloating, open)

Opening connections.

  
Everyone felt a small distortion in the palms of their hands. Kid Win held his hand in front of his face, and uncurled his fingers to reveal a tiny glowing speck. Zorian followed suit, as did Roxy, who leaned in very close to it and squinted at it. Ino pocketed the speck almost immediately to hide it from the others.

Ino heard Kurenai call her and the others for a team battle.

ModThunder: Behold the unanchored Node connection!  
Kid_Win: I’m going to submit this for testing _right now_.  
zKazinski: I'm going to message you in a private channel so we can work together with Mana, alright?

  
As Ino and her team circled up to listen to whatever Shikamaru’s plan was, she passively watched Kid Win place the speck into a tiny glass vial, and hit a button on his desk. He said something into the intercom, and start making his way to the Research division. He could busy himself with that, but she had a fight to win.

As she broke the huddle with her team, she turned to look at the opposing team. Hinata kept darting her eyes over to Kiba, who was yelling at them from across the field. Shikamaru watched them boredly, and Choji just waved at them and wished them good luck. Shino responded by wishing Ino’s team luck in kind.

Sort-of. He actually said “Yes. I would like to see your team also arrive at a state of good fortune,” but Ino couldn’t tell exactly how much of that was a dig at her team and how much was actual well-wishes. 'Arrive at a state of good fortune'? What's that even supposed to mean!

Meanwhile, Zorian had finally started his first class of this iteration of the month.

zKazinski: Still no Zach.  
zKazinski: He didn’t show up last time I went through the month, either.  
zKazinski: Which adds credence to the theory that I replaced him as the time-looper.  
tipsyGnostalgic: so where did he disappear to?

  
While the teacher reviewed the same content for the third time, Zorian just continued watching Ino prepare for the fight.

The two teams watched each other for several long seconds, waiting for the mark that would start the match. Kurenai yelled 'Go!' and both teams bolted into action. Ino's team had opened the fight under the assumption that Kiba, his dog, and Hinata would start with a charge into melee range, and Shino would stand back, supporting them with swarms of insects and various ranged attacks.

Shikamaru predicted the opening perfectly. As expected, Hinata stood on the left, Kiba in the middle, and Akamaru on the right. In response to this, he put Choji against Hinata, himself against Kiba, and Ino against Akamaru. The matchups were unusual, but that wasn't enough to tip off the other team to anything. Kiba lead the charge with confidence.

zKazinski: That’s what I’m worried about.  
tipsyGnostalgic: obvs hes gotta be somewhere  
tipsyGnostalgic: or somewhen  
zKazinski: Agreed, but I don’t know how I would find him.

  
As the distance closed, Choji expanded, bloating like a massive balloon. Hinata skidded to a stop as her opponent turned into a giant ball. Her fighting style relied heavily on targeting pressure points, but with Choji swelled up she wouldn’t have been able to reach more than one or two points with maneuvering around his body and breaking formation. Without bothering to build speed, he began rolling towards Kiba, who met his destructive boulder-form head on, slamming into it in with a powerful blow.

Ino was tackled by Akamaru, and she only just managed to push the dog off of her when she heard Shikamaru speak.

“Shadow Possession complete.”

A long black shadow extended out from his body. It passed under Choji, and went directly into Kiba, who was paralyzed by his contact with the bone-chilling shade. Shikamaru took a few steps back, and Kiba was forced to do the same. Akamaru turned his attention on Shikamaru, trying to protect his master.

Ino held her hands out in front of her body, her palms facing outwards and held her index finger and thumbs apart in a wide circle. She gazed through the window between her hands and projected her spiritual energy through it.

“Mind-Body Switch!” Ino called out.

tipsyGnostalgic: HOLD UP ANY N ALL OTHER CONVOS  
tipsyGnostalgic: INO  
tipsyGnostalgic: WHAT DID U JUST DO???????

  
Ino's mind was in a void. Other than a general feeling of ‘motion’, she didn’t even have any sensory input. For a few seconds, there was nothing. No cold, no pain, no comfort.

And then she was a dog. It was jarring for everybody involved.

Ino!: I did a mind-transfer into Kiba’s dog.  
Ino!: It’s hard to hit moving targets, but I was eye-level with him and he was running away from me.  
tipsyGnostalgic: no  
tipsyGnostalgic: u do NOT get to skip over the fact that you called your attack  
Ino!: I was just telling Shikamaru what I was doing!  
Ino!: He’s the team strategist, he needs to know when I use my risky techniques.

  
Ino then steered Akamaru towards Choji and leaped. Choji rapidly deflated back to Choji-size again, and without the human-boulder in the way, the dog was on a collision course with his master. Ino slipped out of the dog’s mind as Kiba was released by Shikamaru, and the two collided.

Ino came to in her own body, where she was met with the sounds of explosions. Shikamaru _adored_ explosive seals and used them whenever he could. He said he would ‘handle’ Shino’s bugs, and the explosions were a good sign that Shino had started making his move.

Or, more likely, that Shikamaru predicted Shino would start making his move and thus preemptively started blasting the expected location of the swarm. Kiba and Akamaru were in a dog-pile, with a few explosive notes scattered around them. The paper tags fluttered gently in the wind, and they both understood that if they moved, Shikamaru would detonate the (likely dud) explosive seals on the notes.

With Choji now bearing down on Shino and Ino ready to deal with Hinata, the game was as good as won. Ino smiled at Hinata and watched her eyes fade to the strangely beautiful milky-white that they become when her visual powers activated. Veins bulged out in a web-like pattern around her eyes, and she faced Ino.

But instead of engaging, she threw a practice kunai at Shikamaru without even looking at where to aim. Aiming was more of a suggestion with the Hyūga’s famed 360° vision. He tilted his head lazily to the side, dodging the blunted throwing-knife.

She wrapped her hands into a handseal, and the knife boomeranged around to strike him in the back of the head. He went limp. The explosions keeping the bugs at bay ceased, and Shikamaru’s hostage threat was negated. Kiba and Akamaru climbed to their feet and charged Ino. Bugs swarmed Choji, and he was down in seconds.

It was only a few minutes after the fight that both teams were chatting about where they would be having dinner. As usual, Choji got the whole group to the same barbeque place, but this time they would be bringing Team Eight to join them for the meal.

The walk back was dominated by Kiba and Ino arguing over the battle, with Shino providing quips and Shikamaru lazily defending himself and his choices. The whole argument effectively hinged on Shikamaru not suspecting that a Byakugan user would have techniques that target other people’s blindspots.

That devolved into Shikamaru and Shino debating the merits of highly-specific strategies when enemies of unknown capability are involved, and _that_ somehow became Shikamaru trying to defend his overuse of explosives in the fight.

He was doing a good job from a strategy perspective, but completely failed on the ‘economic viability’ end. He had spent most of the team’s funds on that spar, and _lost_. The more she thought about it, the more annoyed Ino became. She had planned on learning fuinjutsu with Kid Win, but the scribing tools involved were _expensive_.

When she became a genin, her father had this huge speech about using money wisely and learning to manage money. She _was_ going to be the clan head, after all. He was happy to help her in other things, but she knew she would have to support herself in terms of ninja tools. It had meant less shopping, and buying shuriken out of bargain bins. But now Shikamaru had blown the team funds, she needed supplies, and they hadn’t even _won_. It was embarrassing, and she desperately wanted to make up for it.

Ino!: That’s it.  
Ino!: Tomorrow I’m going to make Asuma take us out on a REAL mission.  
Ino!: Like the one Sasuke’s on.  
Kid_Win: Good luck convincing Mr. Lazybones to agree to that.  
Ino!: Believe me.  
Ino!: I'll make sure he will.

  
Three minutes of nagging later, he caved. 


	5. Arrangements (Arc 1)

Kid Win was being escorted through the halls of a facility to have an important meeting. Namely, he was in the Protectorate East-North-East Headquarters, being escorted by the Grecian-themed hero Dauntless. He was at last free of the boredom and mundanity of the PRT building, as now he was staying the night on the tinker-tech fortress which was the Protectorate base. It was a separate location from the PRT office because of the distinction between the PRT and the Protectorate.

The Parahuman Response Team was more of a police force that also managed the local Wards, while the Protectorate operated under its own chain of command, but still answered to the PRT in some capacity. As a result, the PRT had a central location that was more like a glorified police station with Wards accommodation, while the Protectorate HQ had an oceanic fortress with a forcefield and surface-to-air missiles.

Normally, his temporary relocation would have been blocked by M/S protocols, but at this point he suspected that his quarantine was less about snuffing out hostile mental influence and more about other precarious parts of the situation. Any event the PRT wasn’t prepared for was to be treated as a minor crisis by default. The PRT HQ could handle parahuman problems, but whatever the Node was, it was decidedly _not_ parahuman influence.

He entered the meeting room, a wide room with a window on one side looking out over the ocean and facing the skyline of the Bay. There was a long, white table with chairs around it, and at each seat was a manila folder. A number of people were in the room, both administrative staff and heroes. From the heroes, he could see his Wards team leader Triumph, the Protectorate ENE leader Armsmaster, the PRT ENE Director Emily Piggot, and a few members of the support staff for the PRT and Protectorate.

On the wall was a large screen, with two feeds each taking up half the screen. One displayed a live video feed of a Hispanic woman, and the other a logo of a stylized dragon on a black background — Rebecca Costa-Brown, the Chief Director of the PRT across the nation, and Dragon, a heroine with the Guild team and world-class Tinker, respectively.

The meeting seemed on the excessive side for a meeting about a Ward, but a bit on the sparse side for a meeting about alternate dimensions. Not that he would admit to himself that he missed all the cool meetings about alternate dimensions while he was in quarantine — there had to be more cool meetings about other worlds, right?

He took an empty seat next to Triumph, the only person in the room he was used to working with in any capacity.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” said Director Piggot, “The Chief Director has called us here to finalize the discussion on the topic of Kid Win and his affliction. Because he has missed a majority of our prior discussion, I believe the Chief Director had a complete summary of our plan to manage this situation drafted, and would like to personally discuss your situation with you.”

“Of course,” started the woman on the monitor with a curt nod, “Kid Win, I’d like to start off by saying your situation is entirely unprecedented to both the PRT and Protectorate. This does not mean we cannot take meaningful action. If our organization was incapable of reacting to new threats, the world would be far worse off.

“Our protocol experts had created several contingencies based on protocols that we had written for a cape joining us with powers not dissimilar to the abilities your ‘Node’ has granted you. We expect you to follow the rules detailed in the folder in front of you, until a new set of protocols can be established for your case and potential future cases like your own.”

He opened one of the many folders on the table, revealing a number of documents. Protocols for capes that trigger together and develop telepathic connections, for capes that exist in multiple realities, and for capes that can open dimensional breaches into worlds with unique resources and sentient beings. Also in the folder, he found PRT Alternate Earth profiles for the other worlds, Person of Interest profiles for his Node-companions, and tentative PRT threat assessments for each of them.

The real treat was the final few reports in the folder. ‘Case 195 Investigation Report’ was the full report on the precognitive blackout that coincided with the appearance of his Node, and a matching report on ‘Case 196’, which was the new term for people connected to a Node. Case 196’s profile was heavily redacted, and a ‘not for public dissemination’ warning was stamped on the front.

He wanted to look through the files, but the way the meeting immediately launched into discussion of the contents somehow did more to distract him from the contents of the folder than help him work through them. Nobody else had this problem, it seemed.

Most of the meeting was about the ramifications of allowing a Ward to work with people from another world unsupervised, but eventually he heard the magic words that indicated his sweet release from the prison of adults talking about him as if he wasn’t there.

“On to the next order of business,” announced Piggot, “I believe Dragon has something to announce?”

With a click, the speakers revealed a Canadian woman’s voice. “Of course. I would like to preface this by saying that Kid Win’s new capabilities have been the subject of much discussion throughout the parahuman law-enforcement community. As part of this, I have recently lead a campaign to have his potential more fully realized.”

Kid Win didn’t even know what was happening, but he already felt like he was going to have a heart attack. Dragon had something for _him_?

“As such, I am happy to announce that, in addition to having all Master/Stranger restrictions from the PRT and Protectorate lifted, I have gotten permission for Kid Win, under the supervision of Armsmaster, to access the Guild’s tinker database as part of our initiative to research these other worlds.”

Kid_Win: What the fuck?  
Kid_Win: _What the fuck?_  
Kid_Win: They just gave me access to the Guild’s tinker database.

  
“Thank you,” he said, calling forth all the PR training he went through, “it would be an honor to aid the Protectorate and Guild in their research. I’ll gladly accept your offer.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Dragon, “We’re happy to have you working with us.”

“Now that we have confirmation of his choice,” said Costa-Brown, “I would like to bring up the next order of business. Director Piggot, while you have done admirably in handling your city’s Wards, granting the Guild an increased presence in the Brockton Bay Wards makes this into a delicate situation.”

Director Piggot, to Kid Win’s experienced eye, looked like she doing a _great_ job at hiding how close she was to blowing a gasket. A few other people in the meeting turned to look at her, and she managed to re-collect herself and stay calm.

“And what changes will we be needing to make to accommodate the Guild’s needs in my Wards?” The word ‘my’ was not needed, but it held a gravity that could not be ignored.

”The Protectorate leadership will not allow both the PRT and Guild to both have greater influence over the Wards than the local Protectorate, nor can the PRT allow a new class of non-parahuman power to be managed without experienced, adult heroes on-site. Keeping the Brockton Bay Wards under PRT supervision was an arrangement made specifically for this city, but this arrangement will have to be dissolved by the end of the year for logistical reasons. The city’s Wards are to be moved to the Protectorate Headquarters in the same timeframe.”

“I see,” said Piggot, “I do not mean for this to sound accusatory, but this arrangement with the Guild is so valuable as to warrant undermining local opinion of the PRT and its operations?”

Well. _That’s_ a new one.

tipsyGnostalgic: whats she going on bout?  
Kid_Win: She’s trying to keep herself from looking bad, because any majors changes like this will reflect poorly on the local PRT.  
Kid_Win: Even if she doesn’t actually give a shit (and she _totally_ gives a shit), she can’t afford to risk scandal involving a youth team at a time like this.  
Kid_Win: Unfortunately for Piggot, it looks like the Protectorate wants the Wards back badly enough to terminate their agreement.

  
“We have full confidence in your ability to manage the situation. However, Kid Win’s condition has long since moved out of the jurisdiction of any single city’s PRT. We’re operating on the scale of multiple universes now, and so this goes far beyond any one city.”

The meeting concluded shortly after that, without much fanfare. Nobody dared question the final conclusion, and slowly people filtered out of the room. Kid Win hung behind, working through a small stack of paperwork with Armsmaster for the Guild. Apparently, Dragon hooked him up with his own Guild connection to ‘better supervise’ Kid Win.

At the instruction of Dragon, he made his way to a room next to Armsmaster’s workshop. He ended up walking with Armsmaster, who was making a beeline back to his workshop after the meeting. They didn’t talk much on the way there. When he got to the room, Kid Win expected some big piece of tinkertech, or any number of things. He didn’t expect it to be a pristine lab with unused worktables and various tools.

Dragon’s voice came in through the intercom in the room. “Good evening, Chris.”

tipsyGnostalgic: BOOYEAH  
tipsyGnostalgic: we gots his name  
tipsyGnostalgic: its chris  
Ino!: FINALLY.  
zKazinski: Took long enough, didn’t it?

  
Chris suppressed an eye-roll. Eye-rolls are far more potent when the others see through your eyes, after all.

“Hi, Dragon. What’s this about?”

“I wanted to bring you to the lab that you’re authorized to access the Guild’s tech database from. It’s also, conveniently, the lab you’re authorized to work with any extra-dimensional energies in. It’s next to Armsmaster’s lab, so he can supervise your activities and work more directly with you.”

Possibilities swam in Chris’s mind. Not just for tech, but how this was all coming together so nicely.

“Did you arrange this for me?”

“Well, one couldn’t quite say I was uninvolved.” She had the sort of voice you could hear the smile in. It was nice.

“So this is going to be my lab when the Wards are moved to the Rig?”

“It’s likely. I don’t see the Protectorate giving you a second lab when all requirements for your lab are met by an existing one.”

_Second lab?_

“Hold on, is this not going to be my Wards workshop?”

She laughed. “No, this is your Guild-affiliate workshop. The terminal on the wall has access to the Guild tinkertech database that I maintain. You can also access it through an app I’ve made for your tablet, but I’ll advise you to not access this information while out of this room.”

Chris nodded, and made his way to a wall of 3D printers of all different sorts, and eyed them approvingly. Dragon kept talking.

“I looked into your work process, and designed the workshop with the intention of making it as usable for you as possible.” The lights in the room dimmed slightly, and a number of laser-lights began pointing at things around the room. “Multiple workstations with miniaturized smart-boards for notes and keeping track of numbers, a large display with a library of pre-loaded graphics to reduce the reliance on numbers, and a number of storage bins that are color-coded and labeled at each workstation to aid in organization.”

“You designed my workshop like a kindergarten room?” he joked, but he was honestly in awe. It truthfully felt a bit patronizing, but at the same time the whole place was set up perfectly for him, with everything he needed.

“I designed your workshop with multiple organizational strategies and resources that are considered useful aids for people with ADD and dyscalculia,” she said casually, as if she wasn’t admitting she had delved into his personal records, “For example, the laser pointers on the ceiling. Most of your tools have small tracker chips, so if you lose anything, just say what you need and the system will indicate where it is to you with the lasers.”

This was possibly the nicest thing anybody had ever done for him, numerous privacy violations aside.

She started going through the whole workshop, showing off all the lights and details that would aid him in his work. Computerized inventories of the room, a checklist system, alarms, and a dozen other things. It was exciting, and his power was buzzing with potential as they went over the workshop.

They made it to the last part of the room, a wall of cubbies with modifiable labels and LEDs. One of the cubbies had a green light turned on.

“So, what are the lights for?”

“The red lights indicate that you’ve removed something from the shelf. It helps you remember to put your projects back after you’ve moved them. The green lights indicate that something you’re looking for is in the box.”

Curiously, Chris approached the lone cubby with a green light. Inside, he found a small box holding a familiar point of light.

“Your micro-portal was approved for work in tinkering, so long as a more experienced tinker is there to monitor your work.” Dragon said, cheerfully.

Chris grinned, and shot a message into the node for Ino and Zorian to give him some chakra and mana from their end. Dragon called in Armsmaster, who was more curious than he cared to admit, and the three of them got to work.

❖

Like her gadgeteering companion, Ino found herself being escorted through hallways to a big meeting. Today was the day she would receive her first C-Rank mission directly from the Hokage, and she felt like she was ready to explode — both from building excitement and the looming potential for danger.

Fortunately, there was a convenient pressure valve in the form of ‘keeping Shikamaru in line’ to keep the agitation from building up in her. At this point, nagging Shikamaru was just the sort of familiarity that they both needed to keep the edge off. Choji kept calm with a bag of colorful candies, and the familiar setting of bickering teammates.

She _also_ had a Node-mate to pester. One with a lab and creative juices already in-motion.

Private Channel with Kid_Win  
Ino!: So, Chris!  
Ino!: Explain guns to me.  
Kid_Win: Alright.  
Kid_Win: Technical language incoming.  
Kid_Win: Guns are technological weapons that use an internal trigger mechanism to direct a prepared medium along a trajectory. This medium, on contact with the target, transfers some form of energy into the target’s mass.  
Ino!: Uh.  
Ino!: Sure, but I mean how is it used in combat.  
Kid_Win: You point it at something, pull the trigger, and hit it _hard_. Once you've fired, you'll probably have to do something to prepare for the next shot.  
Ino!: Right, firepower at the cost of downtime between attacks.  
Ino!: The shots are prepared, so I could load it before a fight and open with it?  
Ino!: I can see how that would be useful.  
Ino!: What kinda of guns are there?  
Kid_Win: I think it's best to talk about what kinds of guns there _aren't_.

  
The three of them, along with their sensei made their way into an office with a window overlooking the village. A man, small in stature and aged, faced away from them, looking over the village through the window. He turned towards them, a warm, almost grandfatherly smile on his face. It was the sort of sight that made Ino wonder if he usually stood there and turned dramatically towards any visitor that entered his office.

It made sense. Ino noted that the only seat in the room was his. It gave the statement that even if he was welcoming them, he was a busy man who wouldn’t spare time for extended meetings in his office. Only he would be in here long enough to sit. She and her team stood a few feet back from his desk.

“Ah, Asuma,” he said in an all too fond manner, “I’m glad you and your team have made it. I believe you sent in a request for a C-Rank mission?”

“That we did.”

Ino caught how casually they spoke. She had almost forgotten how her sensei was the Hokage’s son. Few others would speak to the Hokage so casually.

Kid_Win: Long-range guns rarely have the capability to hit multiple targets.  
Kid_Win: More powerful ballistic guns tend to be loud, which isn't good for a ninja, right?  
Ino!: Loud is fine if you're already in a fight.  
Ino!: There’s no way to hide it at that point.  
Kid_Win: So stealth is good only until the fight starts?  
Kid_Win: I’m thinking some form of sniper rifle.  
Kid_Win: They use range and the speed of their projectiles to hide where the attack is coming from, but they tend to be loud and highly lethal.  
Ino!: Lethal isn't what I'm looking for.  
Ino!: Team 10 is a live-capture team.  
Ino!: We need to focus on prisoner transport and non-lethal takedowns.  
Kid_Win: That is both a relief and something I can work with.  
Kid_Win: What ranges to ninja fights happen at?  
Ino!: All ranges, duh.  
Kid_Win: Okay, that was a dumb question.  
Kid_Win: What range do you fight at?  
Ino!: Medium. The sort of range you’d use to just barely stay out of close-quarters, while still using ranged attacks.  
Ino!: My best techniques are ones I’d do in those circumstances.  
Kid_Win: So, would you want gun fitted for that range?  
Ino!: I want to say yes.  
Ino!: But my inner Shikamaru is telling me to say ‘no’.  
Kid_Win: Oh?

  
“Well, I'm glad that you're showing initiative. We have a mission that seems perfectly suited to your team’s capabilities.”

Asuma gave a smile, and folded his arms. “Well, what is it?”

“A number of farmers on the Northern border of the Land of Fire claimed to have seen a great beast that is picking off their livestock.”

Shikamaru spoke up. “And you want us to catch it alive?”

The Hokage nodded. “Some of the groundskeepers for Training Ground 44 reported a breach in the fence last month, and one of the giant panthers that prowls the forest has not been spotted for a number of weeks. The breach was patched, but the panther is still missing.”

Choji spoke next. “A giant panther?”

“Yes. Training Ground 44 has also picked up the moniker of the ‘Forest of Death’ for its chakra-infused wildlife. Many creatures that live there need to stay in the high-chakra environment to survive. It's likely that our target is in a constant state of chakra-exhaustion.”

‘Our target’. Ino caught those words. Not ‘your target’. The Hokage wanted them to feel like he was with them on this mission, at least in spirit. She couldn't tell if it was meant to be comforting, or just another way to build rapport.

Ino!: I need both hands free to use ninjutsu.  
Ino!: So I shouldn’t have a medium-range weapon.  
Ino!: I should pick a weapon to supplement my techniques, not replace them.  
Kid_Win: Right.  
Kid_Win: I can work with that.  
Kid_Win: Next question:  
Kid_Win: Do you want an energy weapon, or a ballistic weapon?  
Ino!: Tough choice!  
Ino!: Which are you better at making?  
Kid_Win: I think my specialty may lie in energy weapons.  
Kid_Win: I’ve never tried a projectile weapon, because of PRT safety restrictions.  
Kid_Win: I could try something non-lethal, but I’d have to to look into safe projectiles.  
Ino!: Well, I’m trying to hide you from everybody.  
Ino!: I can’t seem too obvious about having a Node.  
Ino!: What do you think could be better passed off as an invention of an exceptionally smart girl instead of a normal girl with a super-inventor in her head?  
Kid_Win: I think a projectile weapon would be your best bet for that.  
Kid_Win: But nothing I make will be ‘normal’.  
Kid_Win: Not by gun standards, at least.  
Ino!: What would prevent you from doing that?  
Kid_Win: My power doesn’t give me the sorts of ideas that would allow for me to make ‘normal’ weapons.  
Ino!: And why would this matter?  
Ino!: It’s a totally new weapon idea in my world.  
Ino!: It can work however we want!  
Kid_Win: Okay, fine. I’ll try that way.

  
“So we have a super-predator that we need to capture before it dies of natural causes,” Shikamaru said, “You specifically want us to bring it in alive.”

“Yes,” the Hokage agreed.

He considered the mission for a moment. “That sounds like a drag.”

“We’ll do it,” Ino said, “C-Rank mission pay is exactly what we need right now.”

“It’s what _you_ need,” Shikamaru stated plainly, lapsing into a light drawl as though he somehow forgot he was in the Hokage’s office, “The rest of us just want to relax a little.”

“Speak for yourself! Nobody will respect us as ninja until we shape up! You think Sasuke or even the Hokage will recognize our potential if I’m lazing around all day?”

Asuma spoke up before whatever fight they were about to break into in the Hokage’s office could start. “Well, I think it’s settled. We’ll do the mission. What time do we head out, and where do we need to go?”

The rest of the meeting was just working out details. They’d leave in two days, and head North, near the border of Fire Country. She focused on the conversation with Chris, working on ideas for the gun. He was playing with her chakra still, getting readings and other data on the energy.

Ino watched him work with all the weird doohickeys and gadgets, talking with his science buddies. It wasn’t something she really understood, but the colorful graphics that adorned all his equipment made it really easy to see the relationships with the numbers whenever he pushed a button or turned a knob. Turn knob left, some numbers go up, others go down.

She worked back and forth with him, and her dad gave her some literature on making seals that she sent through the Node as she read. He was happy to have it, but it was apparently useless until he actually had the physical supplies to make the seals.

That lead Ino to the clan library, where she diligently looked up the chemical composition of chakra-conductive ink, and a number of other materials, like ink generated by jutsu. The issue Chris was having was the lack of materials made using chakra, which had a much bigger part in the production of the various tools and inks used in sealing than they expected.

Most ninja didn’t deal with this sort of stuff until they were older. Almost nobody needed to make their own chakra ink formulas unless they were on the experimental side of fuinjutsu, like the legendary Jiraiya.

The solution they ended up using was for Ino to take a bottle of chakra-ink from a clan storehouse, drop the glowing Node-connection into the jar, and let it drain into the other world through the pinhole-sized portal. It was slow, but they weren’t rich for alternatives.

Ino didn’t even bother helping them out after setting that up, instead practicing her katas and stretches. She had saved a bunch of them into the Node, allowing her to instantly recall the poses in exacting detail. Despite this, it wasn’t as easy to get the katas as she had hoped.

She could recall her body’s pose as it was saved in the Node, with Asuma’s cold hand perfectly captured in her memory as lifting her arm up slightly to correct her position. Sadly neither the Node nor her brain came with the ability to instantly notice the differences between her current pose and the memory. She had to think over every part of herself to make sure it lined up, like playing a ‘spot the difference’ game with proprioception.

Of course, she experimented more with her ability to split her attention between the Node and reality while working through the katas. She still had problems keeping that up, but with practice she’d slowly been mastering the skill. She was spending way more time focusing both on the Node and on reality, but the problem continued to return to the key point of it being impossible multi-task to this degree with anything other than the Node.

If she did the Mind-Body Switch technique, she couldn’t project her other mind out, because that ‘mind’ only existed when she used it to think about the Node. At this point, she was starting to doubt that this was a capability tied to multiple streams of consciousness, but instead to having a greatly expanded one. She could still dream of multiple shots with the Mind-Body Switch, though.

Practicing splitting her attention allowed her to effectively train a third skill at once, of course. She was slowly mastering the skill of reading people’s mood through their body language. It was something all Yamanaka were trained in. Being able to possess somebody didn’t automatically give you the power to read their mind, and no amount of bodily possession would change how a person’s palms sweat when they’re nervous or how their heart pounds when they’re excited.

Being able to continuously practice on three different people at once was a trick that no other Yamanaka could compete with. Of course, with all this, Ino couldn’t help but notice something _off_ about one of her companions.

Private Channel with zKazinski  
Ino!: I’ve got a question for you.  
zKazinski: What is it?  
Ino!: Why is everybody on your world always projecting their emotions constantly?  
zKazinski: What do you mean?  
Ino!: Well, earlier, a girl tripped in your class.  
Ino!: Everybody turned to look at her.  
Ino!: Some people laughed, some people were spooked.  
Ino!: But they seemed to push it out.  
zKazinski: ‘Push it out’?  
zKazinski: I’m not sure emotions are something that can be moved out of a person.  
Ino!: Oh, they definitely can!  
Ino!: There’s a higher-level ninja technique where you saturate your chakra in emotion, and send it out at people to communicate intent and make them feel things.  
Ino!: Some Yamanaka use it to paralyze people before hitting them with our mental techniques.  
zKazinski: So you’re saying people are radiating emotionally charged mana all the time, but not noticing it?  
Ino!: Yep!  
zKazinski: That sounds kind of ridiculous.  
zKazinski: If they are emanating their emotions for any reasons, it’s not in the form of mana.  
Ino!: Well, whatever they’re doing, it’s giving you headaches.  
zKazinski: I get headaches around people because they’re frustrating.  
Ino!: I can see why Roxy likes you, that attitude is actually kinda cool.  
Ino!: It’s like you’re a big noble and they’re all peasants to you.  
Ino!: You needs some work on the regal aspect, though, otherwise you might come off as more of a jerk than you actually are.  
Ino!: Anyways!  
Ino!: You felt the tension in your head that would grow into your headache starting BEFORE you gritted your teeth and tightened your grip on your pencil.  
Ino!: That was a response to the pain, or an ingrained response to ANTICIPATION of pain.  
Ino!: It had nothing to do with the people, best I can figure.  
zKazinski: What sort of deduction was that?  
Ino!: A simplified one, and part of a series of similar incidents over the past day that lead me to believe you are sensitive to emotion-projecting abilities.  
Ino!: It’s a deduction rooted in my wiles and feminine wit.  
Ino!: A woman’s intuition.  
zKazinski: Two things:  
zKazinski: First: Roxy’s a bad influence on you.  
zKazinski: Second: How closely have you been paying attention to me for you to come up with this theory?  
Ino!: Very closely!  
Ino!: I’ve been watching all of you to practice reading emotions off the body language of others.  
zKazinski: Why the hell would you do that?  
Ino!: Because it’s a clan skill!  
Ino!: We use it to monitor people when we possess their bodies.  
Ino!: Besides, you’re the one absorbing everyone’s private feelings constantly.  
Ino!: And we don’t annoy you as much as anybody else, do we?  
zKazinski: Honestly, you don’t.  
Ino!: And somehow that Benisek guy doesn’t annoy you, either?  
Ino!: Despite being endlessly infuriating.  
zKazinski: He doesn’t bother me as much, he’s easy to understand.  
zKazinski: He means exactly what he says, and not much more.  
Ino!: See, you’re getting some really strong readings on people!  
Ino!: If you actually spent time around others, I’m sure you’d understand them a lot more.  
zKazinski: Okay, I might take what you’re saying into consideration.  
Ino!: How about this?  
Ino!: Wait until somebody really annoying comes up to me, Roxy, or Chris.  
Ino!: And tell me if you still get a headache from them.  
zKazinski: Alright, fine. I can do that.  
zKazinski: If your theory holds water, I’ll keep it in mind.  
Ino!: That is all I ask!

  
She kept working through her katas, speeding up as time went on. While the Node may not be a perfect learning aid, it was still a damn good one. Funny how the main thing driving her to train so hard was the very thing facilitating that training, right?

After some time, she grew tired enough to call her exercise routine a job well-done. She was _sweaty_ and _gross_ and she didn't want to be outside where people could see her, even if the only people around were her fellow Yamanaka.

She made her way back to her house, where she would wait in ambush for her dad. She swung open the door, and collapsed into the first chair that dared to be in the general vicinity to her rear. The chair was nice, but the wrappings around her torso were starting to chafe a bit. A few quick picks at the clip hiding under her top later, the sweaty bandages unwound from around her body, and she tossed them aside.

She could not wait for the day that tiny bit of flab on her belly was finally gone, so she could wear her extensive collection of crop-tops freely. Her current exercise routine worked like a miracle. She could accept a lot of being gross _now_ for a more perfect body later. It was basically magic, except instead of chakra or Zorian’s mana it used dieting and caused her muscles to ache in the morning.

Of course, her philosophy on dieting had changed too when Chris decided to introduce her to the ‘food pyramid’ and ‘calorie needs’. According to him ‘just doing the opposite of what Choji does’ was _not_ a valid dieting strategy. She thought she had a halfway decent argument about a person with chakra possibly having different dietary needs, but if it turned out she could eat pork with her veggies and be healthier for it, she wasn’t going to argue against it.

A creaking of the door stole Ino’s attention away from her musings on her own belly, and she saw her dad walk into the room... followed by Shikamaru’s dad. Ino gave out an ‘eep’ and quickly covered her stomach with her arms.

“Hey dad! I didn’t think you’d bring guests!” she said in a sweet voice that screamed ‘murder’.

tipsyGnostalgic: so  
tipsyGnostalgic: why are you okay with us seein your belly?  
tipsyGnostalgic: u hide it from every1 else  
Ino!: Well, you guys have the distinct privilege of feeling it jiggle when I run.  
Kid_Win: It barely jiggles and you’re like twelve.  
Kid_Win: I’m telling you, it’s just baby fat.  
Ino!: Shush!  
Ino!: You get the front row seats to see my progress into the sexiest woman in the world!  
tipsyGnostalgic: ok but  
tipsyGnostalgic: have u considered  
tipsyGnostalgic: me?  
Ino!: This isn’t a competition, Roxy!  
Ino!: At least, not a competition between us.  
Ino!: We can be the sexiest girls in our respective worlds.  
tipsyGnostalgic: thats the best damn idea i EVER did hear of  
tipsyGnostalgic: im down

  
“Hey, Princess,” he had a smile that made it hard for her to stay mad. “Me and Shikaku were just coming in to discuss some things in the village. There’s a big meeting coming up.”

_Ah. Politics._

“Oh, I was hoping to ask you some questions.”

“Well, we have a few minutes.”

Ino’s eyes darted quickly to Shikaku, then back to her dad.

“It’s about clan stuff.”

Her dad laughed, “Ino, I wouldn’t be surprised if Shikaku here hasn’t already figured out just about everything we do up to your level, if not a bit higher. We’ve worked together since we were your age. Anything you can ask me, he can hear too.”

“Unless it’s girl problems, Inoichi,” Shikaku added in a drawl.

Her dad snorted. “Oh, I can answer questions about girl problems, then?”

Shikaku just gave him a grin. Ino couldn’t help but smile along with them. It was funny how much they acted like her and Shikamaru.

“So, my first question is about getting multiple consecutive shots with Mind-Body Switch.”

Her dad raised an eyebrow.

“Well, if you had multiple minds, it could be possible, but any attempts at consciousness-splitting techniques have resulted in disaster. Usually it just knocks out the user, sometimes it causes brain damage.”

Shikaku looks over at him. “What about shadow clones?”

“Shadow clones don’t have the chakra to do a technique like Mind-Body Switch.”

“That’s just a lack of creativity. Have the clone eat a food-pill.”

“That’s almost entirely physical chakra. Mind-Body Switch primarily uses mental energy. You don’t bug Choza for food pills when you’re doing a shadow technique, do you? And you know all the other problems with that.”

Shikaku made his way to the seat next to Ino and flopped down. “Nah, I don’t bug him because I know better than to run out of chakra myself.”

“Alright,” said Ino, “I can understand that.”

“One last thing.” Ino watched as her dad pulled a small slip of paper from his pocket. “This is a note you can bring to that one bookstore next to that barbecue place your team eats at. I’ve ordered a few books on sealing written by the legendary ninja Jiraiya. You can pick them up tomorrow.”

Her dad turned to walk away, gesturing for Shikaku to follow. As they stepped to the door into her dad’s office Ino remembered the _most critical_ thing she had to tell him.

“Wait, dad, one last thing!”

He looked at her with an eyebrow raised.

“I have a C-Rank mission the day after tomorrow, so I’ll be gone from home for a while!”

“Oh, I already knew about that,” he gave her a smile, “Why do you think the books are going to be travel-sized?”

❖

Roxy looked at her phone, and scrolled through a dozen messages on Pesterchum without really reading them.

She knew what the messages were going to be at this point, because even after only a few days they had already fallen into a routine. She didn’t need to see another of Jake’s rambles about the time he was spending with Dirk, or another set of messages less like texts and more like polite letters asking to hang out from Jane. She opened the chats just to get rid of the notifications, and rolled into bed.

She was still in the clothes she spent all day in. She was exhausted enough that she didn’t want to climb out of bed, but at the same time it was uncomfortable enough that could tell herself that that was why she couldn’t sleep. That lasted until she started thinking about the game world she was trapped in.

Roxy felt that SBURB was less of a game than a cosmic kid-killing entity, and she had begun to feel trepidation at actually going out and exploring her Land, especially when another opportunity opened up to her in the form of the Node. She could make friends and explore other worlds, but didn’t have to deal with skeleton monsters or evil alien empresses.

Before playing, she would often think about the things it would give her when she inevitably started playing. She could revive lost loved ones, gain cool powers, explore a whole world of her own, and all it would cost was one measly apocalypse. An ugly trade, but one she was predestined to make.

But the Node was something else. Why would she play the game that was impossible to win, when there were other worlds she could explore? She could see what it was like to be a normal kid in highschool with Chris, go to wizard school with Zorian (an eternal dream of hers), or just see the beautiful forests of Ino’s homeland.

Why play SBURB when the Node gave her so many of the same things, but at no cost? She could sit at home with Fefetasprite and just goof around. Without the Node, she might have taken up Jane on those offers to go out and explore together, and gotten hurt or something. That was also where the guilt came in.

Jane was probably more alone now than ever. Unlike Roxy, Jane had a somewhat regular life before SBURB. She went to school, and did normal teenage girl stuff. All of that was uprooted so easily. Jake and Dirk had each other, Roxy had her Node buddies and Fefetasprite. Jane didn’t really have anybody since she entered the game.

Roxy realized in that moment that she was being a right shitty friend.

If it wasn’t for the imagined feeling of weight holding her exhausted body to the bed, she would go out to rectify the problem immediately. Maybe she would invite Jane to hang out, or invite herself over to Jane’s. Instead, Roxy could only find the power to fall into sleep, watching the messages float past in her head. She didn’t feel herself fall asleep, it was more like sleep crept up on her and took her before she even knew it was near.

There was darkness.

Kid_Win: Roxy, what’s going on?

  
The world shifted, and she was in a familiar place. A modular city of black and white buildings, more like a compound than anything else. The air smelt of saltwater, and the crash of waves and the calls of seagulls filled the air.

Since she had started playing SBURB, her dreams had been like this. Memories of her past, or the memories of the dreaming and the dead that she met on her travels. But this dream was different.

tipsyGnostalgic: woah wait  
tipsyGnostalgic: you guys are seeing this?  
Ino!: Yes, we’re seeing it.  
zKazinski: I see it.  
zKazinski: What is it?  
Ino!: It looks like some city.  
tipsyGnostalgic: this is a dream  
tipsyGnostalgic: and also sorta the afterlife?  
tipsyGnostalgic: my dreams have been like this ever since the first time i died

  
Roxy looked around the recreation of the city. Phantoms of the insect-shelled people that raised her were in the streets. She even recognized some of them, especially the ones who aided her in supplying food to the ever-dwindling compound. Mercurial Peddler, Prodigal Angler, and a few others that she would consider acquaintances or even friends.

She didn’t bother approaching them, or even looking at them closely. They weren’t ghosts so much as her memories of the people she left behind when she played the game. Some of them she had managed to save and bring into the game with her, but many were truly gone. Roxy had decided it would be less sad if they were real ghosts when she first learned that she’d only see memories.

zKazinski: Why weren’t you able to talk to us the last time you were asleep if you were conscious during your dream?  
tipsyGnostalgic: i dunno  
tipsyGnostalgic: somethin changed  
Ino!: Maybe it’s because we’re sharing your senses now?  
zKazinski: That shouldn’t make a difference.  
zKazinski: We had to go through your ‘beauty nap’ even though you were sleeping with a weird crick in your neck.  
zKazinski: But we didn’t go into your dreams.  
Ino!: If I could scoff telepathically, I would.  
zKazinski: Thunder, can you explain what might have changed?  
ModThunder: I’m stumped, actually.  
ModThunder: It’s definitely some sort of interaction between the Node and the metaphysics of Roxy’s context.  
ModThunder: I have my suspicions, but nothing concrete.  
tipsyGnostalgic: is it that ive finally opened my third eye and my void powers are ready to fully manifest?  
ModThunder: Uh.  
ModThunder: No? Maybe?  
ModThunder: It could be because of your new Fraymotifs, but it could just as easily be the sense-sharing or a number of other things.  
ModThunder: The Node’s connection will follow your conscious mind wherever it can.  
ModThunder: That’s why you can still talk to Ino when she switches bodies.  
ModThunder: But if some function of a higher priority level says that it needs to stay with your body, it will do that instead.  
tipsyGnostalgic: so somethin happened and now that function no longer needs to run?  
ModThunder: I didn’t say that.  
ModThunder: There’s a free-floating Node connection located near your physical body.  
ModThunder: If the Node _is_ running something, it could be running it through that connection point.  
zKazinski: That sounds plausible.  
zKazinski: Let’s put our standing theories at ‘the free-floating Node is doing something’ and ‘sense-sharing is allowing it’.  
zKazinski: We can do an experiment to figure out which it is.  
Ino!: Is now really the time for an experiment?  
Kid_Win: It’s always time for an experiment, Ino.  
zKazinski: Roxy, cut off your mindshare.  
tipsyGnostalgic: u sure its safe?  
ModThunder: It is.  
tipsyGnostalgic: k  
tipsyGnostalgic: if i disappear ill see yall in the morning  
tipsyGnostalgic: so goodnight or w/e  
tipsyGnostalgic: /mindShare off  
zKazinski: You still there, Roxy?  
tipsyGnostalgic: yuuuuup  
tipsyGnostalgic: /mindShare on  
zKazinski: So turning off mindshare doesn’t hurt her ability to stay connected.  
zKazinski: What does this tell us, Thunder?  
ModThunder: It means that whatever is happening does not require mindShare to be continuously active, and not much else.  
ModThunder: It could be that it happened that mindShare kickstarts the process of connecting to her dreams, but doesn’t require it to be active once it’s in.  
Kid_Win: I know _I_ didn’t program anything like that in there.  
Kid_Win: It might be in inputFlow.  
ModThunder: Maybe.  
ModThunder: You kids have fun figuring out _that_ obscure metaphysical interaction!

  
Roxy let out a brief sigh of annoyance. That flighty bastard. Couldn’t he be useful in more than the briefest of spurts? She kept moving, putting one foot in front of the other, watching as the scenery shifted, and the landscape bled from her memory of the city to a memory of a strange forest with immense lavender trees with blossoms like a cherry tree.

She didn’t know anyone who would be familiar with a place like this, but she could tell they weren’t from Earth. It was beautiful, and the way her memories of blocky black and white buildings mingled with the forest in the borderlands between the two places had this whimsy to it she couldn’t help but appreciate.

zKazinski: Now that you’re in the dreamscape, we can expect you to be around even when you’re asleep, right?  
tipsyGnostalgic: probs  
zKazinski: Sounds useful.

  
Despite the treecover, the land here was evenly covered in a blue-green grass. The cherry blossom-like leaves falling to the ground seemed not to build up meaningfully, being lifted back up and carried away by the wind not long after they touch down.

Roxy stopped when a voice rang out from the trees above her.

“Hello human! My name Damara!” she said in broken English. Roxy started transcribing everything into the Node for everyone’s benefit.

She looked up, as a member of a familiar species of alien leaped down to her. The alien girl looked to be an older teen, or maybe the equivalent of early twenties in human years. She smiled brightly, showing pearly teeth and lips painted a deep red. Her horns curled around her ears like those of a ram, and her dress was on the tight side.

Her eyes were empty, white and pale. Roxy recognized them as the ghostly eyes of the deceased.

“Heeyy! I’m Roxy!”

“Roxy!” Damara almost sang, “Good to meet you! You dream or you dead?”

“I’m dreamin', thankfully.” Roxy tried to give her warmest smile, but Damara seemed almost disappointed.

Damara gave a weak “Oh.”

“You sure were pumped for me to have kicked the bucket, huh?”

Damara snorted. “Plenty of time for kick bucket later,” she said in a manner that couldn’t be anything but automatic. Roxy gave a weak smirk, and waved her along for a bit of a walk-and-talk.

“So, Damara, what’s it like being dead?”

“Better.” Another instant response, but this time less automatic and more enthusiastic. At least she had come to terms with it, right?

“Did it suck at first?”

“Before dying?” Damara said, “Yes. Death better.” Her face twisted into contemplation. “Calm? Calm _er_.”

This girl, apparently a big fan of being dead, was somebody that Roxy thought might not get her lack of excitement about the whole ‘dying’ thing.

“Was that why you were all so stoked up for me being dead?”

“No, 'stoked up' for not being asleep. When you wake, you gone.”

Roxy thought about her past few dreams. She met lots of cool people, but she couldn’t ever be sure she’d meet the same person twice while out here. The Furthest Ring was a big place, after all, and a lot of ghosts wandered out here. So long as she was alive, she wouldn’t be encountering anybody twice. Her ghostly friends usually ended up just being passing acquaintances.

“What about your friends? You’ve probably had hundreds of years to wander the afterlife with your pals.”

She mumbled something under her breath. It sounded like Japanese?

Ino!: “I don’t have friends.”

  
That was something Roxy would _not_ stand for. “I’d totally be your friend!”

She didn’t know if she could keep that promise, but leaving a girl totally friendless would be a shit move all-around. As bad a move as it might be, something lit up in Damara’s eyes, as much as they could light up with the blankness of death clouding them over. She spoke, once again in her alien pseudo-Japanese.

Ino!: “You can understand me?”

  
“Yeah, I can understand you just fine. There’s a ninja living in my brain, and she can translate.” 

Ino!: “This is great! The other Damaras will be so excited one of the humans can talk to us!”  
Kid_Win: ‘other Damaras’  
Kid_Win: ?

  
“That’ll be so baller, you don’t even know. Just me and my load of Japanese troll-girl besties. We could take on the whole world like that.” 

Ino!: “That would be great! Human friends are always so nice to us, we love them.”  
Kid_Win: Please explain the extra Damaras thing.  
tipsyGnostalgic: alright  
tipsyGnostalgic: so this girl is damara  
tipsyGnostalgic: shes probably not the original damara though  
tipsyGnostalgic: theres lots of timelines in paradox space  
tipsyGnostalgic: but there can only be one main timeline  
tipsyGnostalgic: everythin else is just stuff extra  
tipsyGnostalgic: like the icin on the cake  
tipsyGnostalgic: but like when u die or sleep you always end up in the same place  
tipsyGnostalgic: no matter what timeline  
tipsyGnostalgic: so theres lots of ghosts of the same peeps out here  
tipsyGnostalgic: bein dead  
Kid_Win: That’s... grim.

  
“You seem p’ pumped-of for humans,” said Roxy, “What’s so exciting about us?”

Damara sat down on a log. The tall alien trees in this area mingled with much smaller, Earth-like pine trees. Roxy could see streaks of red flash through the sky and smoke rise in the distance in the more Earth-like forest. There was heavy rain in the distance, which was shifting to cover the landscape.

She wondered if the downpour managed to beat out the forest fire in whoever’s memory this was.

The troll girl started talking, again. She started talking and wouldn’t stop. She seemed angry, and the protective bubble wavered around them whenever her voice rose. Roxy didn’t understand a single word, but she didn’t need to.

Ino!: “Humans aren’t like trolls. Whenever you play the game, you stay friends.”  
Ino!: “All the humans we’ve met are willing to be friendly with us.”  
Ino!: “You’re like a fresh start. I’ve given up on my own kind.”  
Ino!: “Meenah, Rufioh, and even the trolls from the other group of players.”  
Ino!: “They fight each other all the time, and try to pit people against each other for their own gain.”

  
Damara gave a long pause, watching the first drops of rain fall on her bare legs. She shifted herself — her memory of herself — into a more modest outfit.

She lifted her arm in the air, and the raindrops above them stopped. Whenever the drops got too close to the girl, they seemed to deflect outwards. Her eyes glowed faintly, and the hum of psychic energy was discordant with the noise from the increasing cascade of rainfall.

Despite the inclement weather, the fire in the distance grew, and Damara talked on.

Ino!: “Every day she would insult me. She’d say I was weak and that if I didn’t do anything about it, I wouldn’t be worth the grist it cost to alchemize my food.”  
Ino!: “I don’t know why she did it, I had already told her how it would end.”  
Ino!: “We couldn’t win the game. I saw the end of the timeline, we were destined to lose.”  
Ino!: “But she kept going on and on about how we needed to be stronger to win!”  
Ino!: “Didn’t she get that we couldn’t change anything?”  
Ino!: “Or how we were already doomed to die from the second we started playing?”  
Ino!: “But she kept mocking me for being weak, or losing the love of my life to a horse fetishist.”  
Kid_Win: Okay, how could somebody like her ever be dumped for for a horse fetishist?  
tipsyGnostalgic: must be a damn fine horse fetishist  
Ino!: “Eventually, I gave up on them. I turned against them, even. That’s what they wanted, right? For me to fight?”

  
Roxy sat on the log next to her, and slowly, tentatively, wrapped her arm around Damara’s shoulder. Damara looked at her for a moment, and then leaned into the hug. Thunder rumbled. Maybe it was thunder. Roxy thought it was thunder, but it could be the sound of meteors.

She held onto Damara for a long while, waiting for the storm to pass. She never got to see the storm to its end, as the landscape eventually shifted into a different memory, bringing the weather with it. It was a mix of two dreamscapes, a golden city with beautiful, twisting architecture and an endless circus of merriment.

The two worlds seemed to fused into each other, with colorful striped tents topping towers and trapeze and game booths melded into and filled the empty spaces in the streets.

Damara took her hand and dragged her into the city to explore. Hours passed in a blur as she talked with her friends in the Node and Damara.

The next morning, Roxy woke up with memories of meeting a new friend. She considered the fact that she’d likely never see that girl again, but quickly brushed it aside. There was a big day ahead, after all.

She never got around to messaging Jane.


	6. A Huntress in Emerald (Arc 1)

Late-summer nights had this way of beckoning Zorian to go on walks. The air held the heat from the afternoon sun, and it was easy to just get out and enjoy the air. Zorian found himself following the bank of the river running through the city. Despite the calm, or perhaps because of it, Zorian was lost deep in his connection with the Node.

Over the past few days, he had already memorized all of his textbooks for his classes, nearly forty spells from the library, and had made great progress on his current project: memorizing several books full of pre-solved equations for various warding schemes and spell formula. It was more practical knowledge than some of the spells in the library, at least.

It was nice to work on this sort of stuff, especially as a distraction from the _main_ project he was working on in the Node.

Private Channel with tipsyGnostalgic  
tipsyGnostalgic: heeyyy  
tipsyGnostalgic: hows the translation project goin?  
zKazinski: I’ve managed to sort through huge portions of Thunder’s translation database.  
zKazinski: Apparently, he doesn’t even know our languages, and just uses the database to translate it in real-time.  
zKazinski: But the system is translating through a super-complicated fourth language as a middleman.  
zKazinski: A few words might turn into entire paragraphs, then get compressed back into human language.  
zKazinski: It’s really weird, honestly.  
zKazinski: I’ve gotten a flowchart of my process for converting it to my human-readable database, like you asked.  
tipsyGnostalgic: ooooooh gimme!!  
zKazinski: /merge ‘translation_project’ to ‘save’  
tipsyGnostalgic: nice  
tipsyGnostalgic: ill turn this into a program that automates it for us  
zKazinski: You need to teach me this ‘coding’ stuff, at some point.  
tipsyGnostalgic: sure  
tipsyGnostalgic: by the time im done with u ull b FIRE on the keyboard  
zKazinski: That’s great.  
zKazinski: Your language is infuriating, by the way.  
zKazinski: Even more-so with the way you use it.  
zKazinski: I hadn’t even noticed before because Thunder was exempting your ‘oddities’ from his translation, but whenever I deactivate them to look at how your language works in practice, I think I have an aneurysm.  
zKazinski: Did you know there’s a ‘Roxy to English’ translation file he uses?  
zKazinski: Which is incomplete because you make up the rules as you go.  
tipsyGnostalgic: LM ENTIRE AO  
tipsyGnostalgic: u dont even speak english yet n you still gotta die on this hill?  
tipsyGnostalgic: smh just like jane  
zKazinski: Seriously, how do you even butcher telepathic messages like that?  
tipsyGnostalgic: i gotta rly want to come off as a sad excuse for an east coast valleygirl wannabe  
tipsyGnostalgic: its gotta fill my soul  
tipsyGnostalgic: infuse my body n mind with both HAXXOR CRED and enough popular highschool girl vibes to manifest a teen movie antagonist from my language pattrns alone  
tipsyGnostalgic: n only then have i reached the pinacle of my power  
zKazinski: So you’re saying you’re doing this on purpose?  
tipsyGnostalgic: yeah p much  
zKazinski: Well, you’ve increased my workload for the translation project.  
zKazinski: I hope you’re happy.  
tipsyGnostalgic: dont worry bout that  
tipsyGnostalgic: ive ACTUALLY increased the workload for our cute lil bot thatll be translatin for us  
zKazinski: That does help quite a bit, actually.  
tipsyGnostalgic: : D

  
Zorian slowed as he saw something large and metallic caked under the mud at the riverbank. Remembering something from earlier in the month, he approached the object that otherwise appeared to be an indistinct mechanical mass.

He rolled up a sleeve, and wiped mud from the object. It was a child’s bicycle, one that a girl loses during the rainstorm at the start of the month. His first time through, he used levitation magic to free it from the river and help the girl, but this time he had all but forgotten it with the surprise of the Node. He pulled the bike from the mud, and hauled it up to a standing position.

tipsyGnostalgic: i never learned how to ride one of those  
tipsyGnostalgic: why r u salvagin a tiny bike like that?  
zKazinski: A little girl loses it at the start of every month.  
zKazinski: I don’t know where she lives, but now I know where it ends up if I don’t save it.  
zKazinski: So maybe I can work something out to bring it to her later if I miss it at the first of each month.  
tipsyGnostalgic: u gonna do that this month?  
zKazinski: I’m not sure I can.  
zKazinski: I don’t know her address, so it’ll be impossible to have it delivered.  
tipsyGnostalgic: what about those spells for finding stuff?  
zKazinski: You mean divination?  
tipsyGnostalgic: yeah those  
tipsyGnostalgic: when u went to the library u spent ages looking for books  
tipsyGnostalgic: but when we convinced you to just ask the librarian for help she casted some spells to find the books for you  
tipsyGnostalgic: so use one of those spells for finding shit  
zKazinski: And what do I do with the bike in the meantime?  
tipsyGnostalgic: just keep it in ur room or somethin  
zKazinski: You want me to drag a mud-coated bicycle through the lobby in front of everyone?  
zKazinski: I’m not sure they’d let me do that.  
tipsyGnostalgic: dunk it in the river first  
tipsyGnostalgic: the water looks clean enough  
zKazinski: Then it’ll be soaking wet.  
tipsyGnostalgic: better than tracking mud tho  
zKazinski: Fine, alright, I’ll do that.  
zKazinski: I’m going to learn some cleaning spells right after I learn spells to track people.

  
He lifted the bike and dunked it into the shallows. He shook it around in the water, watching as the dirt particles drifted off of the metal. The current and his loose grip sabotaged him when the bike slipped from his hands, bouncing against the riverbed briefly as it drifted away.

With a push of mana, a few quick gestures, and a number of words, the bike shifted and rose out of the water.

tipsyGnostalgic: have i ever mentioned how much i love it when u cast spells???  
tipsyGnostalgic: its so tingly and weird  
zKazinski: You mention it with regularity, yes.  
tipsyGnostalgic: well  
tipsyGnostalgic: to reiterate  
tipsyGnostalgic: i LOVE it  
tipsyGnostalgic: you chant words and wave your hands around all mystickal like  
tipsyGnostalgic: like GOD DAMn  
zKazinski: You have your own powers, you know.  
zKazinski: Your Fraymotifs are fascinating.  
zKazinski: I’m not sure what prevents you from dressing up as a traditional wizard and calling those magic.  
zKazinski: It’s not like the idea of ‘magic’ is solely the domain of mana manipulation.  
zKazinski: We have gods, angels, demons, and stuff relating to them that’s nothing like conventional magic at all.  
zKazinski: Nobody denies that what they do is magic of some form.  
tipsyGnostalgic: nah im not like  
tipsyGnostalgic: a wizard of void or anything  
tipsyGnostalgic: im a rogue  
tipsyGnostalgic: i gots to keep up my roguely aesthetic  
tipsyGnostalgic: i cant be twirlin in a lightshow with darkness sparkles to reveal myself as princess roxy: wizard of void  
tipsyGnostalgic: MUCH AS ID LOVE TO  
tipsyGnostalgic: but i gotta be all sneaky like  
tipsyGnostalgic: like a whishper on the breeze  
zKazinski: I would advise against conflating spellcasting with flashiness.  
zKazinski: And none of that should stop somebody with a name as conflated with darkness and deceit as the ‘Rogue of Void’ from staying hidden, right?  
tipsyGnostalgic: i also love the way you think  
tipsyGnostalgic: don my wizard hat of stealth  
tipsyGnostalgic: n doff it in the direction of fine gentlemen like urself ; ) *wink* ; ) *wonk* ; ) *wink*

  
Roxy actually winked when she said that. Zorian could feel a bit of heat in his cheeks. Ino would definitely notice that and pester him for days. There was even a grin growing on her face. Being a fifteen-year-old boy sucked when a small horde of teenage girls were actively conspiring to turn your body against you.

There was simply no defense against it.

He shook the thought out of his head -- an action the others would certainly notice -- and hauled the bike to the road. He guided it with one hand as he walked.

zKazinski: Erm.  
zKazinski: Thanks.  
tipsyGnostalgic: :3  
zKazinski: I’ve been thinking about the end of the month.  
zKazinski: And the invasion that happens.  
zKazinski: The best way to save the city is to let everybody know about it, but it’ll come off as unbelievable if I try.  
zKazinski: If you were going to alert a city to an upcoming invasion, how would you do it?  
tipsyGnostalgic: HMMM  
tipsyGnostalgic: i dunno  
tipsyGnostalgic: thats a big question  
tipsyGnostalgic: i suppose id start with the police  
tipsyGnostalgic: no wait  
tipsyGnostalgic: som sorta p.i.  
tipsyGnostalgic: like a hard boiled detective that can figure out how its happenin  
tipsyGnostalgic: you can do the investigation a bit at a time each month  
tipsyGnostalgic: and the start of the next month u can give the sleuth his own findings so he continues where he left off  
zKazinski: You’re still very convinced that this is going to be a loop.  
zKazinski: I agree that it’s likely, but until I see it happen one more time, I won’t be sure.  
tipsyGnostalgic: ur just in denial  
tipsyGnostalgic: if u went back in time just once id be all  
tipsyGnostalgic: tipsygnostalgic: sure yea thats a coincidence  
tipsyGnostalgic: but like  
tipsyGnostalgic: CLEARLY nobodys gonna go back in time the same way u did only twice after a spell hit both u and somebody who was already looping for years  
tipsyGnostalgic: thats not how it works  
zKazinski: How many times are we going to argue this?  
zKazinski: Yes, I agree that what you’re describing is exactly what happened.  
zKazinski: Zach was a time-traveler who had already been doing this for years.  
zKazinski: But even though I believe this to be true, it would be stupid of me to base all plans on it on the off-chance something goes wrong.  
zKazinski: Consider this:  
zKazinski: The Node acts differently for every person and situation, right?  
tipsyGnostalgic: agreed  
tipsyGnostalgic: but  
zKazinski: No ‘but’s!  
zKazinski: Because of this, we don’t know how it will interact with time-travel.  
zKazinski: It might have broken me out of the loop when I got connected, and that’s only the start of our considerations.  
zKazinski: It’s entirely possible that when the month resets, you do too.  
tipsyGnostalgic: i highly doubt that  
tipsyGnostalgic: ur temporal mechanics are nothin like mine  
tipsyGnostalgic: we got like  
tipsyGnostalgic: nonmalleable timelines n predestiny  
tipsyGnostalgic: but u can clearly change the past  
zKazinski: Alright, I’ll accept that.  
zKazinski: But we don’t know that I’ll even be connected with the Node when time resets.  
tipsyGnostalgic: k  
tipsyGnostalgic: so  
tipsyGnostalgic: let me hold u up for one moment  
tipsyGnostalgic: we should focus on the end of this month  
tipsyGnostalgic: anythin past that point is full of doubt 4 u  
zKazinski: Okay, so what are you suggesting?  
tipsyGnostalgic: ask ino about espnage  
tipsyGnostalgic: thats like sports news but for stealth  
zKazinski: What?  
tipsyGnostalgic: nothin  
tipsyGnostalgic: if any1s gonna kno how to infiltrate a city  
tipsyGnostalgic: itll be her  
zKazinski: Okay, that’s a good idea.  
zKazinski: Thanks, Roxy.  
tipsyGnostalgic: yw  
tipsyGnostalgic: see u lates

  


Private Channel with Ino!  
zKazinski: Hey, Ino.  
Ino!: Hey, Zori!  
zKazinski: You’re heading out for your mission now?  
Ino!: Yep!  
Ino!: You need to show me your tricks for saving books.  
zKazinski: You just look at a page, save your senses at the moment you see the words most clearly, then transcribe the text into the Node.  
zKazinski: ‘Reading’ from your saved memories is just as slow as reading the actual book.  
zKazinski: So you need to put the words directly into the Node, then save those.  
zKazinski: That works better for instantly recollecting the actual contents of the page instead of just perfectly remembering how the page looked.  
Ino!: It’s not really remembering.  
zKazinski: Oh?  
Ino!: It’s more like a sense.  
Ino!: Like if there’s a buzzing in a room, you can ignore it, but you’re always aware of it on some level.  
Ino!: If it was a memory, it would only be there when something makes it come up, instead of all the time.  
zKazinski: That’s actually a really good observation.  
Ino!: Well, at least SOMEBODY appreciates my genius.  
zKazinski: Right.  
zKazinski: Onto why I reached out to you.  
zKazinski: I was wondering if you could give me your opinion on something.  
Ino!: Okay?  
zKazinski: You know how there’s going to be an invasion at the end of the month?  
zKazinski: I need to know how you would go about invading a city without them learning about it.  
Ino!: So it comes all at once without a chance to guard against it?  
zKazinski: Precisely.  
Ino!: You have to get the other army in, first of all.  
Ino!: The invasion takes place during a festival, right?  
zKazinski: Yes, it does.  
Ino!: They’re using that to get in, but I can’t tell much more than that.  
Ino!: I’ll ask Shikamaru!  
Ino!: He understands this sort of stuff.  
Ino!: We’ll be traveling together for the mission.  
zKazinski: Thanks.

  
Zorian kept going down the road, avoiding the eyes of passing people. He wasn’t a fan of busier streets like these, so he took the first change to duck into a sidestreet and make his way down it. Ino had broken away from the conversation to talk to her teammates as they waited by the gates to her city. Ino wasn’t transcribing the words for him, so he couldn’t tell what they were saying. 

Ino!: I think there’s something important to talk about, though…  
Ino!: You like Roxy, don’t you?  
zKazinski: Might I remind you that there’s an invasion at the end of the month?  
Ino!: You still have a few weeks until then!  
Ino!: C’mon!  
Ino!: TAAALLK!  
zKazinski: Alright, fine.  
zKazinski: She’s nice, but sort of weird.  
zKazinski: I think she’s a good friend, but beyond that I don’t know how to feel.  
Ino!: BUT you still like her, don’t you!  
zKazinski: I’m being interrogated.  
zKazinski: That’s what this is.  
zKazinski: Anything else I say here is said under duress.  
Ino!: You’re damn right it is!  
Ino!: If you don’t spill it to me, I’ll tell her everything!  
zKazinski: That doesn’t even make sense as a threat.  
zKazinski: She _knows_ how I react to her, that’s why she keeps doing it.  
zKazinski: And what are you going to tell her if I don’t say anything?  
Ino!: Okay, okay, you got me.  
Ino!: I’m just super curious.  
Ino!: I want to see this go somewhere!  
zKazinski: What do you mean?  
Ino!: Two lovers from different worlds, who can never meet in person, working to stay together anyway?  
Ino!: It’s so romantic!  
zKazinski: How is that romantic?  
zKazinski: It’s not like being in a Node together is in any way an inconvenience for a relationship.  
zKazinski: You’re pretty much always together.  
Ino!: I’m sorry, but I just can’t imagine myself in a relationship where there’s no kissing.  
Ino!: It’s a vital part of any love story.  
zKazinski: I wouldn’t know anything about that.  
zKazinski: Also you just said that it’s romantic when two people can never meet.  
Ino!: It’s more of a beautiful tragedy when it happens like that.  
zKazinski: I see, my new friends wish tragedies upon me.  
zKazinski: I wonder what blasphemy I’ve committed to deserve this?  
zKazinski: Anyways, what’s your friend saying?  
Ino!: Shikamaru is talking about the strategy involved with sneaking an army into a city.  
Ino!: He needs to know some stuff about your defenses.  
Ino!: He’s asking about sewer systems or other underground tunnels.  
zKazinski: The sewers are expansive.  
zKazinski: It was, at one point, part of the Dungeon beneath the city, but it was renovated and turned into a sewer system.  
Ino!: Do any parts of the dungeon expand past the border of the city?  
zKazinski: Maybe the deepest parts do?  
zKazinski: Around the outskirts, there’s a few places without plumbing, so the city must expand out further than the surface of the Dungeon in those places.  
zKazinski: I’m not a city planner.  
Ino!: That makes me think that a copy of the city’s plans might be useful.  
Ino!: Can you get those?  
zKazinski: I’ll check the library.  
Ino!: Cool, send me a copy of everything you find.

  
It took only a short while for Zorian to carry the bike to his room and then make his way back out to the streets. Ino had departed from her own town for the first time, and he could tell she was watching her surroundings carefully. It really was her first time away from home, wasn’t it?

His first stop in the library wasn’t particularly helpful. It was easy to get a map of the city and the plans to different parts of the city’s layout, but anything related to the construction of the underside of the city was heavily restricted. They weren’t going to let just anybody get access to the underground of the city, at least not here. He just saved the city map and moved on.

❖

“No, there’s no major issues to report in the drainage lines,” the foreman said. 

zKazinski: This guy’s so infuriating.

  
“Listen,” said Zorian, “I just need to know if there are any places you’re having difficulty with. Maybe a giant mole broke through a wall or something.”

“Not happening, son. Our work is the sturdiest in the city.”

zKazinski: ‘Not happening, son. Our work is the sturdiest in the city.’  
zKazinski: Is he trying to sell me his company’s services or something?  
Ino!: I think his business is on the rocks.  
Ino!: He’s WAY too defensive about how he’s doing down there.

  
“So you mean that, out of all the other construction companies I’ve spoken with, yours is the only one not having to deal with monsters from the Dungeon?”

“Our techniques are the best secrets in the business,” he said with such smooth confidence that it was almost disappointing that nobody would ever believe it.

zKazinski: So he knows something we need to know, maybe?  
zKazinski: Possible involvement with the invasion.  
Ino!: OR  
Ino!: - And hear me out -  
Ino!: You could ask him about the invasion directly.  
zKazinski: That’s such a bad idea.

  
“Then you’d be okay with telling me what the weaknesses were _before_ you got to work on the drains, right?”

The man’s face went hard. “I think it would be best if you left.”

Zorian voiced his agreement by turning towards the exit.

Ino!: C’mon! If you do this, you’ll just get to try again next month.  
zKazinski: You’re just going to keep insisting, right?  
Ino!: Yep!  
zKazinski: I don’t want to rely on the time-travel to solve my problems.  
zKazinski: If you haven’t noticed, being trapped repeating the same month is the very problem I’m trying to solve.  
Ino!: I thought the problem was the invasion?  
zKazinski: That too.  
Ino!: Well, you’re going to have to find out what happens when you warn everybody.  
zKazinski: You mean like letting the government know?  
Ino!: Exactly.  
zKazinski: Why would they believe me?  
zKazinski: And you’re one to be lecturing me on secrecy.  
Ino!: WELL EXCUSE ME FOR BEING REASONABLE!  
Ino!: I’m keeping secrets for way different reasons than you!  
Ino!: For one thing, I’m active-duty as part of a military unit.  
zKazinski: So’s Chris, if you think about it.  
Ino!: Shush!  
Ino!: Not the same thing!  
zKazinski: You both go on and on about non-lethal takedowns.  
zKazinski: The biggest difference I can see is that you deal with external threats, while Chris keeps the peace from within his own city.  
Ino!: It’s more complicated than that.  
Ino!: The reasons I keep my secrets are mostly because a ninja village EXPECTS us to do this!  
Ino!: It’s part of the political balance.  
Ino!: The clans derive power from our secret techniques and bloodlines, which allow us to help guide the village and prevent any one faction from becoming too powerful.  
zKazinski: I understand the system.  
zKazinski: There are noble families with their own secret magics and bloodline powers on my world.  
zKazinski: But you could at the very least show your own family, right?  
zKazinski: Tell me one good reason to keep this a secret other than that it’s expected that you have secrets.  
Ino!: We’ve went over this!!!  
Ino!: And you’re deflecting the whole conversation!!!!!  
Ino!: Okay.  
Ino!: Listen.  
Ino!: You’re still thinking like the Node, time travel, and invasion all being the same thing.  
zKazinski: Not really.  
Ino!: But telling people about the invasion saves lives!  
Ino!: And with the time stuff, you’ll get multiple tries to figure out how to warn everyone.  
zKazinski: No, I _get_ the difference.  
zKazinski: But me and Roxy agree that it’s best to make any of my plans only last for this one month, and won’t have any repercussions after the month ends.  
zKazinski: When we know how the Node and the loop interact, we can make plans.  
Ino!: If the month resets, everybody forgets the weird kid who went on about the invasion.  
Ino!: If it doesn’t, you SAVE LIVES!  
Ino!: Zori, you’re a good friend.  
Ino!: But you’re being really obstinate right now.  
zKazinski: Okay, so give me a strategy where I make people actually believe that the invasion is happening.  
zKazinski: And I’ll do it.  
zKazinski: But right now nobody will take me seriously.  
Ino!: Okay.  
Ino!: You’ve got about two-and-a-half weeks to convince a whole city there’s going to be an invasion and save as many people as possible.  
Ino!: And that sounds way harder now that I say it myself.  
Ino!: How about this:

  


❖

Zorian tugged the small sack of fliers, pulling it higher on his shoulder and reducing the strain. Since he ran out of tacks to put his fliers on posts, he dropped all the pages off at various houses. There wasn’t much strategy beyond targeting the homes that looked more high-class and a few key locations he had already marked on his mental map of the city, so it didn’t matter that much.

It was ridiculous, but this was the best plan they could come up with. The issues came with how it’d taken a rather small amount of time for the city to start becoming aware of him. Not every flier he’d put on somebody’s door or on a lamppost had went unnoticed, and more than once he had to flee a site because he tripped a ward or alarm.

Reactions to his quest would be delayed long enough for him to hit a few more buildings, a precious amount of time granted by his bomb and arson threats being written in a cipher. Some of the notes also had a provided key, so he could be sure that people would actually be solving it.

Zorian had delivered over half the fliers by this point. Ino guessed that rumors would be kicking up sometime tomorrow, and some people would be actively searching for the answer while others would be trying their best to share the information on the notes.

Extra attention was placed on remaining undiscovered until that was happening. He had a scarf wrapped around his face, and a hood pulled up over his head just to complete the ensemble. He decided he would have to burn the clothes and the stamp he made the letters with afterwards, so that nobody could track him with divination magic. He might still end up arrested, of course.

A small price to pay for the whole city, all things considered.

Ino!: Don’t turn around.  
Ino!: And don’t freak out!  
Ino!: But you’re being followed.  
zKazinski: What?  
Ino!: There’s been a woman who’s been watching you.  
zKazinski: Since when?  
Ino!: I spotted her a few times.  
Ino!: Walk a little faster, down the street.

  
He started moving, following her instructions carefully. She still had him placing fliers, but he was starting to go way off the planned course. 

Ino!: Sometimes you’ll see her out of the corner of your eye or in your peripheral, but not really pay attention to her.  
Ino!: But I notice her, and I’m sure you’re being followed.  
Ino!: I’m going to try to get you somewhere safe, okay?  
Ino!: I don’t think she’s with the city.  
zKazinski: An invader?  
Ino!: I don’t know!  
Ino!: She’s suspicious looking and that robe’s shape doesn’t work with her body-type AT ALL!  
zKazinski: Okay, describe her to me.  
zKazinski: In a more meaningful manner.  
Ino!: She’s wearing a green robe, leather boots, and a monster mask.  
Ino!: Average height.  
Ino!: I can’t see her hair.  
zKazinski: A mask?  
zKazinski: Do you think she’s a battle mage?  
Ino!: Uh.  
Ino!: She’s lightly armed, if she’s armed at all.  
zKazinski: You noticed all this about her, and I didn’t even notice her.  
Ino!: You looked right over her several times!  
zKazinski: Okay, okay, I get it.  
zKazinski: We’ll have an optometrist appointment made once you’ve helped me get away.  
Ino!: Your vision is just fine!  
Ino!: Turn left.  
Ino!: As soon as you’re around the corner, RUN.

  
Zorian felt his pulse quicken.

He took a few steps around the side of a small shop, and began running as hard as he could.

Ino!: Is the underground more or less safe than the surface?  
zKazinski: Is this the time for questions like this?  
Ino!: ANSWER.  
zKazinski: Less safe!  
Ino!: Oh.  
Ino!: In that case I have some bad news.  
Ino!: Take another left.

  
Zorian checked his memory of the map. She was leading him to a road that he remembered sporting a construction site. He could see the skeleton of a building, and felt a little more confident that he and Ino were on the same page when she directed him right into the heart of the site.

He ran through the open gate, slamming it closed behind him. The foundation of the building had been dug out, and the walls of the basement were half built with brick and mortar. The shell of a building didn’t have a staircase to get to the exposed underground, so Zorian awkwardly hopped down the wall.

He heard the gate swing open behind him, and he clung tight to the wall he had just climbed down, where the cover of shadows protected him slightly.

Ino!: See that hole?

  
Ino jerked her head in a direction. After a moment’s confusion, Zorian moved his head in the same way to see what she was talking about. There was a metal cover over an access tunnel, and he dashed over to it. It was heavy, but soaking the seal between the lid and the ground with mana let him pop it right off.

Without a second thought, he hopped into the depths.

Liquid sloshed around at his feet. He cast a lantern spell, and looked around the dark passage he found himself in.

zKazinski: So why did you lead me here?  
Ino!: It’s easier to lose somebody in a maze if your maze has lots of tight corners.  
Ino!: And the city streets are big.  
Ino!: Turn around, head deeper into the city.  
zKazinski: Right.

  
He trudged through the water as quickly as he could, approaching a junction. All the paths led on into the darkness, but the right path lead straight to another set of branching paths. Ino told him to go that way. The others were yelling in his head, asking him what was happening and where he was going.

He didn’t dare lose his focus on Ino’s words. Everything she said made sense. He was being chased by somebody -- an outcome he expected -- but she had promised again and again that she’d see him safely through it, and he believed her.

She guided him around another corner. She was watching the map, trying to predict where they were in the tunnels. A few times he heard the echoes of feet sloshing through water, and he wondered if she was still on his tail, or if it was just some monster from the Dungeon that would eviscerate him just as quickly.

At some point, when his heart wasn’t racing so quickly, he finally started to notice the smell.

Soon he began to focus more on movingly stealthily, avoiding detection. He would only cast the lantern spell for brief periods of time, favoring moving in the dark when he found longer stretches. He tried to be more quiet, listening carefully for any indication of a foe.

It felt like he was being watched, and that unnerved him. Each corner felt like an ambush waiting to happen, and at some point the thought crossed his mind that he might step on a weak section of floor and fall into the lower levels of the Dungeon. _Tens of thousands of gallons of water rush through here every day,_ he reminded himself, _I don’t weight nearly that much._

Seeing places where the floor had collapsed and water cascaded into the depths made his attempts at reassuring himself feel pretty weak. He focused on breathing and finding the clarity of mind he relied on to cast spells. He was alone in the Dungeon, being actively pursued, but he was a mage and _he would act like it_.

He turned a corner, casting his lantern spell to see around the bend, and a woman with a dragon mask stared at back him. She took a few steps forward and held out a thin metal rod. A blur of light shot from the rod, hammering Zorian in the shoulder.

He spun with the hit, falling into the water. He tried to push himself up, but a boot slamming into his back shoved him back in. A hand grabbed his shoulder, and yanked him out of the water. The woman stood behind him, locking his arm in her own and holding the rod to his neck.

“Don’t make any sudden movements,” she said in an accented voice, “How did you find out about the Summer Festival?”

Zorian coughed up water. The woman shoved the rod harder into his throat. It made the coughing hurt even worse.

“Talk.”

“I... Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If you don’t know anything, then I’ll just kill you for wasting my time. We didn’t get as far as we did by playing nice. Talk.”

A sense of support and calming rushed through Zorian's head. Alien images and feelings, and a single word blurred together. Everything felt somewhat incomprehensible, which made it much easier to focus on the word.

[Stall.]

“I heard two people in an alley,” he lied. “They, uh, they were talking about an invasion. I tried to sneak up on them, but they attacked me.”

He felt a pain in his abdomen. His head jerked down, and he saw the woman plunging a knife in and out of his torso rapidly. Blood dribbled down his already soaked shirt, and the cloth clung to the wounds. His legs gave out, but the woman held him up.

Ino!: ZORIAN!

  
The knifing stopped. The woman let him go. He just barely managed to lift his head above the water, where he saw a massive spider latched to the woman’s throat, goring it. Everything got blurry for a second, but he caught himself on some pipes before he could fall back into the water.

The pain abruptly ended, like it was taken from him by an unseen force. Small blessings, he supposed. The spider watched him. Zorian wrapped his arms around the pipes, and hoped that would be enough to keep his head above water as his strength left him.

Ino!: It’s okay Zorian!  
Ino!: I’m here!  
Ino!: I promise you’ll be okay?  
Ino!: Zorian?  
Ino!: ZORIAN?!?!?!

  


❖

When Zorian came to, he was on some sort of soft bedding, draped with an even softer cover. Under the covers, the only clothing he could feel was a bandage wrapped tight around his torso. The room was dark and quiet and its air was cool. He tried to sit up, only for pain to lance through his abdomen, forcing him to lay back down. He quickly checked the Node, and checked the clock Chris had made. Almost two days had passed since he blacked out.

Chris himself was asleep sitting up, probably at a workstation. Roxy was probably also asleep, given that she was surrounded by some of those alien worlds that bled together, having tea with a ghost of a gray-skinned cat girl and another version of herself. Ino was in the woods somewhere, following her team-leader as they navigated the shadows under the canopy.

tipsyGnostalgic: ZORIAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! : D : D : D  
Ino!: ZORI!  
tipsyGnostalgic: UR OK!!!!!!!!!!  
tipsyGnostalgic: i was so worried  
Ino!: Me too!  
Ino!: We’ve been worried sick for you!  
ModThunder: I kept telling them you’re alive, but they weren’t listening.  
Ino!: We were too listening!  
Ino!: You’re just dubious as a person.  
ModThunder: Fair.  
zKazinski: Well, I’m alive.  
zKazinski: Unless the afterlife got renovated.  
ModThunder: Oh, there’s an afterlife?  
ModThunder: Nevermind, you could be dead then.  
Ino!: What the hell???  
Ino!: You’re saying that if we die, we could just end up in the afterlife and still connected to the Node?  
ModThunder: Pretty much, yeah.  
ModThunder: Only cessation of existence could disconnect the Node from the host, apart from a few other things.  
ModThunder: So don’t die.  
zKazinski: I’ll consider that option more closely next time.

  
An exotic thought drifted through his head, unlike his own thoughts.

[I see you’re awake. That’s good.]

It reminded him of the morning he woke up with the invitation in his mind, but more lively. It had a voice -- a recognizable cadence.

[Thank you, I’m sure in time you’ll develop your own mental voice. Also, my apologies for not getting you a human doctor, but our hands are tied with such matters. We did our best to clean your wounds and apply sutures, and no spells forecasted you dying of anything but infection. We’re taking extra care to prevent that.]

tipsyGnostalgic: oh god brainfuck  
tipsyGnostalgic: ino u take this  
Ino!: That is so weird.  
Ino!: It’s like a voice in your head?  
zKazinski: You can hear it?  
tipsyGnostalgic: its in ur language  
tipsyGnostalgic: but yes

  
_You’re reading my mind, right?_ thought Zorian.

[Yes, but I’m not digging too deep. To do such a thing to one who is Open would be unbecoming.]

The telepathic ‘voice’ didn’t come from a direction in the way a person’s voice did. It simply was, and it made it all the more unnerving to be alone in the dark room. Zorian cast a lantern spell, illuminating the area around him. He found himself in some dark pocket of a cave, hidden away in a dead-end.

The pile of cloth he rested on was some sort of silk, bunched up and spread about.

Ino!: Can she hear us?  
zKazinski: How am I supposed to know?  
ModThunder: She shouldn’t unless you’re dedicating all your thoughts to the Node.  
Ino!: Like how we can think two thoughts at once?  
ModThunder: A weird way of wording it, but yes. You can offload some of your thought processes into the Node, so long as you are interacting with the Node.  
ModThunder: It’s one of the features that was enabled from the moment the Node booted up.  
ModThunder: It allows you to communicate with your Node-mates while doing intensive tasks, but as a side effect all Node-based interactions are protected from non-metaphysical mind-reading.

  
_Open? What does that mean?_

[You are what you would call ‘psychic’, like we Aranea are. Though your ability seems especially unique, given that you are communing with individuals not even we can reach.]

 _I have no idea what you’re talking about,_ Zorian thought-lied.

[I’m reading your surface thoughts. There’s no use in lying in this situation.]

Zorian calmed himself, and cleared his head. Normally he would do a simple breathing exercise in this moment, but breathing hurt too much, so he just focused on the distant sounds echoing through the cave. As a mage, his skill at remaining focused and meditative was greatly above the average person’s.

[Dragging your heels won’t help your situation any. It _is_ important that we hold this conversation. I have a degree of interest in this method of communication you’ve developed, given its range and apparently privacy. Despite being a novice psychic, you must have leveled your human mentalism well, or have connections to somebody else who has done so.]

There was a moment of pause, Zorian tried to think over his options. If he didn’t cooperate, this Dungeon monster would likely just extract the information of the Node from his head.

[So the method of communicating with us involves some sort of node? I’d love to have more clarification on this. Should you be willing, I could provide some degree of information about Aranean mental arts in exchange for your designs for this ‘node’.]

Ino!: What’s she going on about?  
zKazinski: She wants our ‘designs’ for the Node, because she recognizes that I’m connected to it, but can’t see the actual communications.  
zKazinski: I’m being offered a chance to study their magic in exchange for giving her insight into at whatever she thinks the Node is.  
Ino!: So there’s multiple of her kind?  
Ino!: Why else would she want to talk to anybody if she’s a big scary monster?  
zKazinski: You’re right.  
zKazinski: Most dungeon monsters stay underground for a reason.  
zKazinski: It’s not like we have trade routes with the denizens of the sewers or anything.  
zKazinski: But what do I do about her knowledge of the Node?  
tipsyGnostalgic: just tell her  
tipsyGnostalgic: its not like ull lose out on anythin by admitin shes outta luck  
Ino!: So he should tell his mysterious rescuer that he can’t give her the thing she may have rescued him for?  
zKazinski: No, Roxy means that I should tell her that the Node isn’t replicable with conventional magic.  
tipsyGnostalgic: yeah sure thats totes what i meant 100 per cent  
Ino!: Okay, so then what are you offering in exchange for her magic?  
zKazinski: First of all, I never agreed that I would learn weird mind-reading from a monster.  
zKazinski: Second, I would just offer your techniques.  
Ino!: HEY!!!

  
_I would, but this isn’t exactly a replicable thing. I wouldn’t describe it as human magic._

A slight scuttle sound echoing from down the tunnel announced the approach of _something_. Zorian turned his head to see a fuzzy spider as large around as a barrel-lid, like the one that attacked the woman from before.

[Allow me to introduce myself. I am the matriarch of this Web. It is polite considered to exchange names when meeting with a human, yes? While my name can be translated to human language, it is at its most elegant when expressed conceptually.]

Zorian felt himself briefly taken by a complex series of thoughts and abstractions. Whatever he had been communicated, it represented itself like a violent strike, a sort of conceptual weapon of unyielding force and willpower ploughing through confusion and ignorance, while leaving a trail of those very same concepts to follow it.

It took him a few moments to break the abstractions down and process them. The whole experience was punchy, despite its complexity. It faded quickly, but the memory lingered on his mind as he worked to process it all.

tipsyGnostalgic: her name is bullshit bulldozer  
Ino!: I suppose that’s a way you could interpret that?  
Ino!: I would have went for something with more elegance.  
Ino!: The ‘attack’ part of her name carried a sort of strength, but also precision.  
tipsyGnostalgic: bullshit SNIPER

  
_Your name is... Spear of Resolve Piercing Through the Heart of the Matter?_

[If you desire to call me such, you may. Aranean names often sound flowery when translated into human language. It may be easier to simply refer to me as the matriarch, and I would not fault you for it.]

_Right. Thank you for helping me recover._

[I won’t lie, it was a decision we debated. Allowing a human into our Web was not a popular choice, but given that you are Open and were attacked by a flickermind in our territory, we decided to aid you. But there will be a small cost to our aid, more akin to a courtesy we ask of you.]

Of course there would be ‘courtesies’ expected. _Alright, what is it?_

Another pair of spiders entered the room, this time completely silent. Something about that struck Zorian as unusual. Behind them, they drug his clothes over the cave floor. One of them fished through the pocket of his pants for a moment, and pulled out a small glowing dot.

[Would you mind explaining this item? It holds no magic of its own, yet it folds space ever so slightly around itself.]

Ino!: Okay, so I suppose that there’s no sense in trying to trick her now.  
Ino!: Unless you try really hard to trick her.  
Ino!: I’ll even help, because I understand that it may be valuable to hold secrets!

  
Zorian opted to ignore her for the moment and focus on the matriarch.

_That’s part of the connection with others I have._

[I see. And can these others track your location through this?]

Zorian tried to think of an answer that wouldn’t appear as a lie, but was cut off by another message intruding into his head.

[They do not exist on this world, then? Is this a divine artifact of some sort?]

Damned mind-readers.

_No. It’s something else. I have been trying to more greatly understand this connection. I would describe its origins as even more alien than that._

[I see,] the message came with an undertone of curiosity, [And I would then presume that you are working with these others in exchange for exotic magical methods and traditions?]

_I am, but I don’t know if our methods are interchangeable. One of the people I’m bonded with is a specialist in an exotic form of mind magic, which might be of interest to you._

The spider considered this for a moment.

Ino!: THERE!  
Ino!: THERE IT IS!  
zKazinski: What are you talking about?  
Ino!: You reading the emotions off of people!  
Ino!: The spider isn’t even moving, and you’re reading it like a book!  
Ino!: And we can feel it too!  
tipsyGnostalgic: gasp  
tipsyGnostalgic: shes right  
tipsyGnostalgic: i can feel it too  
tipsyGnostalgic: that spiders fuckdeep in the contemplates  
zKazinski: Okay, I’ll admit it’s weird.  
zKazinski: But she’s put a lot of ideas in my head.  
zKazinski: How is this one any different?  
Ino!: You’ve never felt anything like this from the people around me.  
zKazinski: Couldn’t it be that the cultural barrier keeps me from reading the people you meet?  
Ino!: No, because I only feel emotions when I’m reading your senses.  
zKazinski: Roxy only spends time around an alien ghost and Chris lives in a laboratory.  
tipsyGnostalgic: i ALSO hang out with video game aliens with chess exoskeletons  
Ino!: Why are you so opposed to being an empath?!  
zKazinski: You’re exhausting, Ino.  
zKazinski: It’s kind of a feminine power, and I get enough shit for how I’m not manly enough already.  
zKazinski: And learning that so much trouble in my life (social interactions, headaches, etc.) might be traced back to an inborn power I never learned to control isn’t good news.  
tipsyGnostalgic: at least ur not sufferin alone  
tipsyGnostalgic: i grew up with gd aliens  
zKazinski: That’s some amount of compensation.  
zKazinski: Sort-of.

  
[I see. Very well, we’ll have an exchange. While you recover we will train you in our mental arts so you don’t waste away in here, and you will give us what you can of your companion’s methods.]

 _Thank you,_ thought Zorian.

[You’re welcome. Lessons starts tomorrow.]


	7. A Huntress in Black (Arc 1)

The most important detail of any tinkertech device is how satisfying it is to hear the _click_ of a switch installed on the machine. If the click isn’t good, then where was the fun in flipping the switch? Even when shutting down his prototype Hyper Cannon, Chris loved the sound. The whines and whirs of electronics shutting down were kicked off by the sound of an analog switch locking into place.

It was only improved by his tinkertech stereo blasting K-Pop in the background.

The Hyper Cannon was his main project before the Node came along. A nine-foot laser gun mounted on a floating platform. It started much smaller, a measly three-and-a-half feet, but rapidly ballooned into the monstrosity that now sat before him.

He had the idea stuck in his head for a long while, but every time he got to a certain point, the whole thing got disassembled and used for other inventions. He had started and restarted the project a number of times, each time getting a bit closer to his ideal weapon before stalling out and losing all inspiration for the project.

Except the aforementioned stereo, of course. It was just the perfect shape to build a cannon around, and he couldn’t figure out why.

He quickly checked a few things on his computer, starting with his email. Other tinkers were willing to trade quite a bit for samples of exotic energy, and Dynamo — a tinker from the Orlando Protectorate that specialized in generators — seemed especially enraptured by the idea of working with it. She was willing to do a trade for any samples she could get.

Another window showed that Roxy’s code was almost compiled. Roxy had noticed that the Node could take data from things running into it, and that lead to her writing up something that would run Earth Bet’s internet infrastructure into the Node. It only functioned when the miniportal was placed into a receptacle she designed.

She had thrown together half of the device in her world and left Chris with instructions on building the other half of the device. He got carried away with his improvements to her design, and it showed. His was cased in a sleek, machined shell with custom attachments and improvements. Roxy didn’t feel the need to add more than the essentials, so she had a tiny piece of junk held together with duct tape and a prayer.

Kid_Win: I think the code’s almost done.  
Kid_Win: I have some ideas for what we can do with it.  
zKazinski: I’m not surprised.  
zKazinski: Even I have ideas for it.  
zKazinski: You’ll be connecting our brains to a world-wide information network.  
zKazinski: That’s _extremely_ useful, even if it’s one from another planet.  
Kid_Win: It’ll only work when the portal is in a specific place, though.  
Kid_Win: I won’t be able to tinker with anything you send through the portal at the same time we have the internet.  
ModThunder: Not exactly.  
ModThunder: You know, with all the extra processing power from having chakra, mana, and Void in all of your worlds, you could afford to generate a few more portals.  
ModThunder: You could leave one here, and use another for your various technological escapades.  
Kid_Win: That would be perfect.  
Kid_Win: Can you set that up for us?  
ModThunder: Sure, just give me some time to do some work on the back-end.  
ModThunder: I’ll be in my private channel, if any of you need me, just let me know.  
tipsyGnostalgic: im so excited : D  
tipsyGnostalgic: my body is hella WRACKED with the anticipates  


  
A knock got Chris’s attention away from the screen. The door slid open to reveal Shadow Stalker leaning into the frame. The hallway was brighter than the lab, which silhouetted her dark cloak and metal mask. A quiver of crossbow bolts hung on her belt, with one of her crossbows held loosely in her hand and the other strapped to her thigh.

“You done with your nerd shit?” she said, “I’m bored, and they’re letting us go on a patrol if we go together.”

“Who is ‘us’?” Chris asked.

“Just us. Me and you.”

“So we were offered a patrol, and nobody took it but you?”

“It’s the fucking Pelham’s Christmas party,” she said with a disdain for the winter bash. Chris couldn’t tell if she was just being an unfestive Scrooge or if she hated the Pelhams and their brand of heroism that badly. “There’s nobody but you and me here.”

Chris almost smacked himself upside the head. Today had been the last day of school before Winter Break, so Eric Pelham would have been handing out the invitations today. If it wasn’t for his ‘quarantine’ that he totally hadn’t been using as an excuse to skip class, he would have been invited too.

If he wasn’t going to the party, he might as well do something tonight, right?

“Okay. I’ll go.”

She gave him a nod and turned from the doorway. Chris scrambled around the room, grabbing pieces of armor and other gear. His hand hovered briefly over an untested energy blaster. He grabbed it and hurried out the lab to a changing station.

He met Shadow Stalker in the garage, where a van took them across the energy bridge and into the world of normal people, where bridges weren’t made of hard light. Or hard neutrinos, if he remembered the specifications of the bridge correctly.

tipsyGnostalgic: finally some superhero action  
zKazinski: I’m just glad all the action is happening to people other than me.  
Kid_Win: It was just a little shanking, dude.  
zKazinski: I was stabbed eight times.  
Kid_Win: That still only counts as one shanking incident.  


  
The PRT van lurched to a halt somewhere Downtown, surrounded by the bustling life of the city. Shadow Stalker put a finger on her earpiece hidden under her hood and did a quick equipment check as she opened up the back of the vehicle. The PRT officer on the consoles went over the route and gave them a timeframe to be picked up. Kid Win followed Shadow Stalker as she climbed out of the back into the cold December air.

Kid Win tapped a button, and when the hum of electronics was steady, he tossed out a board not unlike a clunky skateboard that hovered in the air. He mounted it and followed Shadow Stalker as she started down the sidewalk. She was ignoring onlookers, glancing into alleyways and up at the roofs of buildings. When she found what she was looking for, she ducked into the alley and started climbing a fire escape.

Soon they were traveling over the city, Shadow Stalker leaping from rooftop to rooftop, with Kid Win following her from above. They made their way over busy streets and empty alleys alike. Shadow Stalker had a great deal of skill at spotting potential criminals and tended to keep mental tabs on anybody she thought was suspicious as she moved in a zig-zag pattern over the route.

They did this for over an hour. She would work in silence, avoiding the view of the public except for the occasional glance followed by the pointing of fingers. Kid Win instead flew low, greeting people on the streets and talking with.

He enjoyed seeing the reactions of his Node-mates to the way people gawked at them on the streets. He casually signed autographs and posed for pictures with people young and old. At one point, he pulled out his prototype laser pistol and showed it off to a group of teens he recognized from school.

Apparently they weren’t invited to the Christmas party either.

His escapades were interrupted by Shadow Stalker calling in, asking for backup. He hurriedly excused himself and flew over the buildings to her location. It led him far off the route they were meant to take for the patrol, into gang territory.

He descended onto a roof next to her, and she only briefly acknowledged his arrival before turning to to look down a street.

“See that man down the street?” she said, pointing at a man in the distance, “He’s got a tail. He’ll be mugged or beaten when he goes ‘round the corner.”

“How can you tell?” Kid Win asked.

She shrugged. “I got a better look at him earlier. He’s homeless. Some guy’s been following him.”

Kid Win reached for his earpiece, but Shadow Stalker reached out and snatched his wrist.

“What are you doing?” she spat.

“I’m checking in to get permission to engage?” he said, confused by, but not particularly offended with, the venom in her tone.

“Then they’ll know we’re off our route.” The reply was plain, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

“Well, we probably shouldn’t be off our route.”

“And that would help us catch this guy, how?” She loaded a tranq bolt in her crossbow dismissively, and broke into a humanoid cloud of shadows to hop to the next roof.

tipsyGnostalgic: shes kinda a bitch  
Kid_Win: Yeah, I know.  
zKazinski: She’s going to get you in trouble.  
Kid_Win: Yeah.  
Kid_Win: I know.  


  
Kid Win took off, following behind her as she navigated the buildings by shifting back and forth from her human form to her shadow state. He flew low, hanging near buildings and avoiding view of the street.

He slowed to a halt on a building at the end of the block. Shadow Stalker had already beaten him there, where she was fidgeting with the string on one of her crossbows. He landed slowly, and approached the side of the building next to her.

Shadow Stalker lifted her mask briefly and wiped her glove on her face.

“The cold’s gonna give me a fuckin’ nosebleed,” she said, “Anyways, watch that alleyway. The guy’ll probably try to corner him there.”

Kid Win looked at her for a moment. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to reveal ourselves? If he knows there are heroes in the area, he won’t try to start anything. That’s the whole reason we do public patrols.”

She took a look at the shaved head of the stalker, and then went back to messing with her crossbows.

“Sure,” she said, “but the point isn’t to make us look like we come here on occasion. The point is to make sure criminals know we _stop crime_ here.”

“What else would we be here for? Heroes stop crime everywhere they go. We can still just go down and spook the guy.”

She looked at him for several long moments. Her metallic mask held a stern, authoritative expression, but the way she held her glare gave the impression that she was probably just pissed.

“Do you know who patrols this territory?” Kid Win didn’t respond fast enough for her liking, and she continued. “Stormtiger. He wouldn’t hesitate to pick a fight with us. We can’t just be taking casual strolls through here, we have to show we mean business.”

tipsyGnostalgic: thats DUMB AS HELL?????  
tipsyGnostalgic: wouldnt that only piss the superbaddie off?  
Kid_Win: I think she cares more about her image of not taking any shit from criminals than stopping crime.  
zKazinski: Or maybe she’s bored and looking for a fight.  
Kid_Win: Or maybe she’s bored and looking for a fight.  


  
“There’s a reason we weren’t supposed to leave the patrol route. If we’re in the middle of Stormtiger’s territory, and we get into a fight here, that’ll reflect on the Protectorate as a whole.”

Shadow Stalker didn’t even turn to look at him this time. “No. We already patrol through villain territories. The whole damn city is villain territory. They won’t know the difference.”

The homeless man rounded the corner. He had this haggard look about him. He was black, wearing a sweater that looked too thin for this weather and had a graying beard.

His pursuant hadn’t gone around the corner yet. He was more well-dressed, but still gave off the appearance of somebody living a rough life. This man was white - no surprise there - and had a heavy coat on. He looked around, like he was looking for witnesses or places to run if things went bad.

“Moron doesn’t even look up,” said Shadow Stalker, completing Kid Win’s thought for him.

“We should make our move. Now.” Kid Win started turning towards his board, when Shadow Stalker’s hand sped out to grab his wrist.

“Don’t. Give them a moment. We’ll catch him in the act, make it stick.”

Kid Win almost snapped at her, but collected himself for a moment before speaking. “If we catch him in the act, we have to call in the cops or the PRT to arrest him.”

Her grip loosened, and Kid Win tugged his arm free.

“Okay, fine. We’ll move now, but don’t you dare fuckin’ let him think he can get away with this.”

He mounted his board, and began descending, a bit behind the homeless man. The board hummed gently, catching the attention of the man. Kid Win gave a smile and a wave, but continued to hover just around the corner.

After a few seconds, the stalker man stepped out from behind the building, only to find himself face-to-face with Kid Win floating four feet in the air with a very prominent laser gun loosely gripped in his hand.

tipsyGnostalgic: OMG  
tipsyGnostalgic: LOOK AT HIS FACE!!!!!!!!  
tipsyGnostalgic: NO GET CLOSER!!!!!!!!!  
tipsyGnostalgic: GAAAAWD THE VIEW!!!  
tipsyGnostalgic: he practically pissed himself  
tipsyGnostalgic: /snapshot Kid_Win  
Snapshot saved! 

  
“Hey there, citizen!” Kid Win said.

The man clutched at his chest and took a step back. He stumbled a bit, then somehow found the strength to turn his faltering steps into a dead-sprint away from Kid Win.

tipsyGnostalgic: he was all “the fucks that noise????”  
tipsyGnostalgic: and BOOM  
tipsyGnostalgic: superhero  


  
He watched the man run down the street. There wasn’t any point in chasing the guy. He hadn’t actually committed any crimes, despite his best efforts at it. The man slipped out of sight after a few moments.

A whoosh of air alerted him to Shadow Stalker materializing nearby.

“You gonna let him go?”

“Yes.” Kid Win replied with the sort of caution one developed after prolonged exposure to Shadow Stalker. He should have expected she would get this way.

“I told you,” she said, “he can’t think he can get away with this.”

“Get away with what?”

She swished her hand around in the air, indicating some nebulous concept of ‘this’ that Kid Win didn’t quite give half a fuck about. She was about to do something, and only one of them seemed to realize that it was going to be something stupid.

“Before you chase him down,” started Kid Win, “I’ll call in to HQ if you take another step..”

She stilled, half into a step. “Fine, whatever.”

She turned around and stomped away.

tipsyGnostalgic: shes got PROBLEMS  
Kid_Win: Yeah, you’re telling me.  
tipsyGnostalgic: can u like  
tipsyGnostalgic: figure out wht her dealio is??  
Kid_Win: She’s crazy.  
tipsyGnostalgic: ye obvs but what kinda crazy???  
tipsyGnostalgic: gotta psychodisect this bitch b4 she gets u killed  


  
“Hold on a moment!”

Shadow Stalker kept moving forward. Kid Win dismounted the board — putting himself on equal footing with her. He’d learned the hard way that trying to talk to somebody while literally hovering over them never went well. He tucked the board under his arm and ran up to her.

“What?” she spat. He caught up to her side, and she moved just a bit faster to stand in front of him. He considered trying to catch up and put them on equal footing, but then decided to drop the issue. That wouldn’t be the hill he would die on.

“Why was it so important that we ‘taught him a lesson’ or whatever?”

“Other than him being a skinhead shitbag?”

Kid Win took in a breath, and slowly let it out. She was right on that mark, and he wasn’t going to deny that. That man _was_ clearly a criminal, and almost certainly a racist, too.

“I mean that you didn’t even check on the victim,” he said, “You only cared about catching the bad guy.”

She still didn’t make any motion to give him attention. Instead, she looked up at the rooftops and down alleys, endlessly vigilant.

“He didn’t need our help.”

tipsyGnostalgic: ‘he didnt need our help’  
zKazinski: I think he did.  
zKazinski: As somebody who was recently followed around a city and attacked, I’d have loved to have a hero appear to save me.  
tipsyGnostalgic: u ignored us that whole time u were chased  
zKazinski: I was prioritizing survival.  


  
“Sure, but he was still about to be attacked in Stormtiger’s territory. We could have _at least_ escorted him somewhere safer.”

“Not a damn safe place exists in this city. And you think that’d help him in the long run?”

They took a few more steps in silence. Kid Win waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She didn’t even turn around to see the expectant look on his face.

“Uh, I guess not?” he finally said, “It would help him now, though. Isn’t that the heroic thing to do?”

“Sure, whatever. That’s not the point. That man came here on his own. It’s not our duty to hold their hands like they’re goddamn babies.”

“So we’re just supposed to leave him defenseless?”

“He could've defended his own self if he didn’t walk in here like he owned the place.”

tipsyGnostalgic: ‘like he owns the place’  
zKazinski: She realizes you’re both still in the same territory, doing exactly that?  
zKazinski: Right?  
Kid_Win: I think so.  
Kid_Win: She doesn’t really care about the risks of being in supervillain territory because she has a crossbow and an attitude.  
zKazinski: If only I could get through life with just those two things.  
zKazinski: Instead I’m forced to rely on time-travel and spiders.  


  
“You think he deserves to get attacked if he comes here?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. He fucked up by being a homeless loser, and getting attacked is a consequence of that. Doesn’t mean he deserved it or whatever.”

Kid Win tried not to be too surprised. This was really what he should’ve expected from her, after all that he had seen from her. It was uncomfortable how callous she was, but he was filled with a morbid curiosity. He wanted to see what was ‘under the hood’ of this crime-fighting machine.

“So winners don’t get attacked?”

She snorted. “Everybody gets attacked, sooner or later. Maybe not by a skinhead in an alley, but somebody shits on them somehow.” She finally turned to look at him, like she was imparting some hard-earned wisdom. “Winners fight back, and they make the smart moves to get out of a bad spot. If you can’t be bothered to make shit better for yourself, you must be pretty fuckin’ content wallowing in the mud.”

She turned away from him. “That man got where he was not by walking into some villain’s territory,” she continued, “but by losing his job, by being a drunk, and probably a million other things leading up to this. He got here by his attitude. Would he be in Stormtiger’s territory alone at night if he was a winner?”

tipsyGnostalgic: ‘if he was a winner???’  
tipsyGnostalgic: this girl needs 2 take a chill pill  
tipsyGnostalgic: the chilliest of pills  
zKazinski: Wow.  
zKazinski: I think I need to scrub my ears after hearing that.  
zKazinski: And I don’t even speak the language.  


  
“We can’t be winners all the time, Stalker.”

“It’s about attitude,” she repeated.

“If you get jumped out of the blue, how’s that about attitude? Or if you go through some heavy shit you can’t ‘attitude’ your way out of?” He noticed the slip of his tongue only once it happened. He made a point to not swear in costume, but the empty streets and weight of topics was making him a bit less Kid Win and a bit more Chris. He didn’t mind that too much.

“It happens. But you can’t lose the little fights in life, or you’ll dig yourself in deeper. It’s about consistency, winning whenever you can. There can’t be room for failure in there; it adds up. You don’t take all the victories you can, and your life goes downhill.”

Chris thought of his own home life for a moment, and the day he got his powers. Problems did add up, he agreed there, but no amount of ‘winning attitude’ could’ve helped him out from the place he was in. He didn’t say anything, but the idea that something as simple as ‘a winning attitude’ could have helped at all pissed him off. He had to fight himself to keep the silence.

zKazinski: She needs counseling.  
zKazinski: Maybe a stuffed bear to talk about her problems to.  
Kid_Win: Fuck her, honestly.  
tipsyGnostalgic: u cool dude?  
Kid_Win: I’m okay.  
Kid_Win: Just ticked off.  
Kid_Win: She went through some tough shit and now she thinks she’s some wizened old master who ‘gets it’ more than everyone else.  
Kid_Win: Preaches that garbage like it’s the solution to everything.  
Kid_Win: Probably thinks she’s the only person in the world to trigger.  
Kid_Win: Well her ‘magic bullet’ wouldn’t have helped me.  
Kid_Win: It never fucking did.  
tipsyGnostalgic: :(  
tipsyGnostalgic: i got a question  
tipsyGnostalgic: probs a bad time to ask this but w/e  
Kid_Win: Yeah?  
Kid_Win: I’ll try to chill long enough to answer.  
tipsyGnostalgic: y did u pick the name kid win?  
Kid_Win: Hard to say.  
Kid_Win: I was excited to have the chance to make a ‘new self’.  
Kid_Win: That’s part of the reason you only knew me as Kid Win for so long.  
Kid_Win: I was happy to just be a hero around you guys, and keep Chris out of it all.  
zKazinski: Do you think of yourself as living the lives of two people?  
Kid_Win: We’re the same person.  
Kid_Win: Sort of.  
Kid_Win: Same history, I guess?  
Kid_Win: But I’m Kid Win when I’m in costume. Kid Win doesn’t have to put up with problems that never go away. Having Kid Win around even _solved_ some problems on the Chris end.  
Kid_Win: Being like this I can actually make a difference. Help people.  
Kid_Win: But she struts around saying that people who can’t help themselves don’t deserve people who can help them.  
Kid_Win: Well fuck that.  
Kid_Win: I want Kid Win to be the sort of person Chris would have wanted to meet.  
tipsyGnostalgic: do u think he is?  
Kid_Win: He’s getting there.  


  


❖

“Good news, you all have the Holidays off while we finish moving you in.”

Chris held his sigh. There wouldn’t be any arguing that point, Deputy Director Renick could be a bit of a hardass when it came to getting the Wards out of the way of whatever they were doing. At least they’d be rid of him by the end of the year.

The only Wards who seemed happy with this were Rory and Dean. Dennis even complained about how, with Missy having just finished unpacking, they were all now moved in as well as they could be. Chris agreed with him there. What else was there to do?

They essentially just used the skeleton of the city’s old procedures, from before the Brockton Bay PRT took the reins. Even if they were scrambling to manage the paperwork, the actual forms being filed and contracts being signed weren’t all that different from the ones used to graduate Wards to the Protectorate. And paperwork didn’t warrant kicking the Wards off the Rig.

ModThunder: Improvements are done!  
Kid_Win: Wait, now is the time you decide to finish upgrading the Node?!  
Kid_Win: Right as I’m kicked out of my lab?  
ModThunder: Most of the work was actually improving the infrastructure of the Node Core to make it more usable.  
ModThunder: You know that I don’t just translate all the time, right?  
zKazinski: Your idea of translating is having a flowchart do it for you.  
ModThunder: I might shortcut with heuristics a bit.  
ModThunder: I’m very busy clearing the gunk out of the backend.  
zKazinski: Can you use those heuristics to answer a question of mine, then?  
zKazinski: It’s about the English language and my translation project.  
ModThunder: Okay?  
zKazinski: Why is ‘evoke’ spelled with the letter ‘k’ and ‘evocation’ spelled with a ‘c’?  
ModThunder: Ask a different question.  
zKazinski: Why do ‘attach’ and ‘detach’ have a different number of t’s?  
ModThunder: So!  
ModThunder: The upgrades I’ve made to the backend are very useful.  
ModThunder: I’ve streamlined the filtering system and changed the toggle command to be more intuitive.  
ModThunder: Just do ‘/togglePortal (name of input person - ID of the input portal) (name of output persons - ID of output portals)  
tipsyGnostalgic: were still limited by 1 input per person????  
ModThunder: I have an alternate command if you want multiple portals to output to the same portal, it should be in the directory.  
tipsyGnostalgic: k  
tipsyGnostalgic: ill write my own command to make this easier for us  
zKazinski: Your hard work is being replaced by Roxy’s work.  
Kid_Win: Your work is appreciated, Thunder, but it’s appreciated more as an API.  


  
Chris found a small amount of solace in his ability to tinker with the Node’s commands. That managed to keep him occupied in a way that taking mechanical pencils apart couldn’t.

Still, the room was full of people giving and receiving looks of sympathy or awkward ‘I’m so sorry’ glances. Missy was the one he was especially worried about, because any change of her schedule on such short notice would throw her parents into a frenzy over who she would be staying with for the holidays.

“And another thing. Kid Win, Shadow Stalker. I would like to speak with you both, outside.”

Chris quickly punched a message into the Wards group chat on his phone. There was a chance they might be able to hang out during the break, according to some texts they were bouncing around. It would be better than all of them waiting around at home for the break to end.

Him and Shadow Stalker stepped out with Renick, pulling their masks tightly onto their faces. They couldn’t be in the hall unmasked, where guests might see them.

“I suppose the two of you have a good reason for breaking your route yesterday?” said the Deputy Director.

Kid_Win: Oh god.  
Kid_Win: We didn’t report this, how did they figure it out?  
tipsyGnostalgic: dont u put trackers in ur gear????  
Kid_Win: Yes, but I can only turn them on from my lab!  
Kid_Win: Though, thinking about it, I should probably make my tracking devices input directly into the Node.  
Kid_Win: Oh, I could also get access to other live info from my gear! Gyroscopic aiming data would be nice…  
zKazinski: Chris, focus on the scolding.  


  
“If I recall correctly, Kid Win, you should be documenting as much as possible about your current situation for analysis purposes,” he started, “At 9:05, Shadow Stalker asked for you to check on an incident. Following this was twenty minutes of radio silence. Normally, we look over these deviations in scheduling and after-action reports, but given your situation? This is unacceptable.

“Your new power isn’t fully understood, and while all reports by Watchdog are being treated as enthusiastic endorsements, not all powers that be want a Ward with voices in his head breaking procedure so blatantly.”

Kid Win nodded.

tipsyGnostalgic: GAWWWDDD  
tipsyGnostalgic: he just keeps talkin  
tipsyGnostalgic: dont get me wrong all my friends are super talky  
tipsyGnostalgic: words runnin like bath water  
tipsyGnostalgic: but the adults around u are always like  
tipsyGnostalgic: “oh yea pal we got all sorts of fancy super geniuses in the SUPER GENIUS CIA backin u up but we cant trust u cause reasons”  
zKazinski: Those ‘reasons’ are probably something like ‘it would weaken us politically’.  
zKazinski: My parents used to do that all the time, even when it makes no sense.  
tipsyGnostalgic: they seem 2 trust stalker pretty good  
zKazinski: She’s a known quantity.  
zKazinski: And not totally faceless.  
tipsyGnostalgic: oh no they dont get to distrust me cause im faceless  
tipsyGnostalgic: im takin a selfie right now  
tipsyGnostalgic: kw open up the internet thing so they can see how HOTT i am  
Kid_Win: I will, just give me a few minutes.  
zKazinski: It annoys me how suspicious they are.  
zKazinski: Do they treat every unknown from their own world like a potential corrupting force?  
zKazinski: Look at those cell-phone things. Every time I’ve seen Rory he’s been on it.  
zKazinski: He could be talking to dangerous unknown parahumans.  
Kid_Win: He is.  
Kid_Win: The dude cycles through girlfriends like crazy, though, so I don’t know which one it is.  
zKazinski: Is that normal?  
Kid_Win: No clue.  
Kid_Win: Still haven’t had a girlfriend.  
tipsyGnostalgic: i cry so many tears at our perpetual singlocity  
zKazinski: Anyways, my question was actually about him having a secret identity.  
zKazinski: He’s dating somebody, but clearly can only do it with one identity at a time.  
zKazinski: So do his girlfriends know his identity?  
zKazinski: How does he keep it secret?  
Kid_Win: Aside from dating other capes?  
Kid_Win: There’s lots of courtesy things you do.  
Kid_Win: Not revealing identities is one of those things.  
Kid_Win: There’s legal papers usually involved.  
Kid_Win: You guys are one dimensional journey into my world away from having to sign a NDA just for breathing in my presence.  
Kid_Win: The second they can put a pen in your hand, it’ll be all over for you.  
tipsyGnostalgic: ive never signed a document in my life  
Kid_Win: But this sort of thing is normal for parahumans.  
tipsyGnostalgic: do i gotta design my signature beforehand or do i just wing it???  
tipsyGnostalgic: is there a signature office i have to register my signature with?  
Kid_Win: They know you can’t share anything with the outside world, and I tell them that I’m working to keep the identities of the other heroes safe from you.  
tipsyGnostalgic: lmao they buy that???  
Kid_Win: I don’t think they do, but they can’t stop me.  
zKazinski: I bet they’re more worried about making sure they know what’s going on with us than what you’re doing.  
zKazinski: Known quantities.  


  
While Kid Win focused on the Node, Renick just kept going. It took a bit more scolding, and several implications that somehow the Youth Guard caught wind of his actions and started raising hell before the two of them were free to go.

Renick left Kid Win and Shadow Stalker on their own, leaving them to think about the incident. Kid Win wouldn’t be allowed on more unsupervised patrols for a while, and they apparently knew about the untested weapon he brought with him. Miffed, he started towards his lab for some last minute tinkering, but Shadow Stalker stopped him.

“Hold on,” she said, “I gotta ask why you just took that.”

Kid Win raised an eyebrow under his visor. She would have seen it, but it wasn't for her benefit. Roxy started transcribing.

“I didn't see the point in arguing. He was mad that the Youth Guard came down on him.”

“Not the point. After yesterday, I thought you were better than that.”

That gave him pause. He threatened her, but it _improved_ her opinion of him?

“That wasn't a battle I had to win,” he managed, “I don't think it was a battle at all. Just Renick being pissy.”

“That’s bullshit. He could have punished you however he wanted, and you didn't even try try to defend us.”

“And what should I have said? Why didn’t you say anything if you were so afraid of getting punished?”

She didn’t say anything for a long while.

“I wanted to see if you would fight back,” she said, “You didn’t learn anything.”

Kid_Win: Yeah well.  
Kid_Win: I’m the last person they should ask to diligently record everything you guys do.  
Kid_Win: Unless you start going around murdering people or gerrymandering Roxy’s game world or whatever, I’m not interested.  
zKazinski: Your standards for things that are noteworthy and criminal have been improving I see.  
zKazinski: You never reported my attempt at a political campaign.  
tipsyGnostalgic: ‘political campaign’  
Kid_Win: Making bomb-threats is well within acceptable bounds.  
Kid_Win: Start gerrymandering and that’s when you’ll really catch my ire.  
Kid_Win: Other unacceptable crimes include: Eloping, the exotic pet trade, being complicit in merrymaking, crimethink, and opening those long popsicles in plastic tubes with your teeth.  
tipsyGnostalgic: p fuckin draconion dude  
tipsyGnostalgic: i make merries all the time  
tipsyGnostalgic: its like christmas with all these merries flyin about  
Kid_Win: The point is that I’m not required to report if I know people are up to weird shit unless it’s illegal, and so I’m not doing it for you.  
Kid_Win: I have better things to do, like tinkering and getting chewed out by deranged Wards.  
tipsyGnostalgic: i dont trust that girl  
tipsyGnostalgic: how is she even a hero????  
tipsyGnostalgic: u KNO shes gotta have killed some1  
Kid_Win: Maybe, but probably not.  
Kid_Win: The only reason she’s here is because she made a plea deal in court.  
Kid_Win: She could join the heroes instead of going to juvie, but I don’t know anything about what she did.  
tipsyGnostalgic: holy hell  
tipsyGnostalgic: so she actually might have killed a person????  


  
Kid Win could faintly see his blurry reflection in her mask. He tried to focus on his own shapes and colors in the silver metal. It was preferable to seeing the stern woman’s face the metal was molded into, and the way he could read her scowl even hidden behind the mask.

Even if she hadn’t killed anybody, she had probably maimed someone horribly. He couldn’t discount the people he knew she had injured in her escapades. When it became clear that he had nothing more to say, she walked away.

zKazinski: Let’s hope she’s not a murderer.  
Kid_Win: Yeah.  
Kid_Win: Let’s do that.  
Kid_Win: So what’s everyone doing?  
tipsyGnostalgic: inos still workin on her books too much 2 talk  
tipsyGnostalgic: shes still watchin what we say tho  
tipsyGnostalgic: im just chillin  
zKazinski: I’m working on the translation guides and practicing trying to translate on the fly.  
zKazinski: Learning a new language is always fun, but this is way more interesting.  
zKazinski: I’ve also met a few new Aranea.  


  
Chris went back to his lab and generated a second portal. He popped it in the interface and got to work on the interface. Dragon’s work on his lab let him keep tabs on all the materials and tools he had, which meant that once the Node and the computer systems were integrated, he could blueprint with nothing but his thoughts and run the various printers remotely.

With a mandatory holiday looming, it became increasingly critical that he finished the project. Even a week without tinkering was not something he wanted to deal with.

tipsyGnostalgic: whatre they like???  
zKazinski: Lately they’ve been forcing me to learn telepathic defense by laying my bed right next to the entrance of their nursery and letting the babies telepathically assault me.  
tipsyGnostalgic: so that feelin like somebody took an eggbeater to ur brains  
tipsyGnostalgic: its babies  
Kid_Win: Don’t knock the live-fire preschooler training, dude.  
Kid_Win: I flinch away from kids when they so much gesture in my direction with plastic toys.  


  
“Hello, Chris,” said Dragon’s voice through the intercom. He perked up a bit at her voice. Something about working with another Tinker — especially one like Dragon — was really nice. A breath of fresh air, even compared to the Node. “I’m sorry about the meeting.”

“You know too, huh?” he said.

“You brought an untested weapon out of your lab. It was logged by the inventory system, and we decided to watch your patrol more closely to make sure it didn’t ‘go off’.” She had more humor in her tone that he expected. It was a nice change of pace compared to Renick.

tipsyGnostalgic: u gotta tell us about the best ones  
tipsyGnostalgic: ur collection of spidergals  
zKazinski: I’ve spoken with the one who saved me a few times.  
zKazinski: A scout named Watchful Eyes.  
zKazinski: Apparently she had been following me for a while, and decided to save me when I was attacked.  
tipsyGnostalgic: whats she like??  
zKazinski: She doesn’t like non-psychics much.  


  
“I told her she would get us in trouble,” he said, taking his seat, “I guess I only got myself in trouble, right?”

She didn’t respond. Chris opened up a small kit full of the tools he picked out for his latest project. “I hope you’re not planning on finishing this in one night,” she said, waving the laser pointers in the ceiling over his workstation.

“I’ll need something to do over the ‘vacation’.”

Dragon took on a sympathetic tone, “Alright, but focus on just one project. I think programming seal printers would be a good place to start.”

“Not enough ink, and Ino has to supply chakra to the system while making seals. If I programmed it, I’d have to be here to watch it and make sure it doesn’t jam or catch fire during testing.”

Kid_Win: Ah, a spider supremacist.  
Kid_Win: Just what we needed.  
zKazinski: It worked out in my favor, at least.  
tipsyGnostalgic: whats up with them not liking us flickerheads or whatever  
zKazinski: They can’t communicate as clearly with non-psychics.  
tipsyGnostalgic: n i dont speak spiderthink but im not lettin that ruin me  
zKazinski: Most Dungeon dwelling monsters aren’t psychic, and fighting over tight spaces.  
zKazinski: I get why they don’t trust those they can’t communicate with, even if I don’t agree with it.  


  
“You don’t think your simulations can handle the chakra?” she asked.

“They don’t work at all. I have to manually adjust the outcomes every step. Chakra just doesn’t work well with my power. Mana is better, but the simulation for that isn’t finished yet.”

“Ah,” said Dragon. She mused more audibly whenever she wasn’t projecting her face on the giant screen. Ino had to point that out to him, but he couldn’t help but notice it constantly afterwards. “So you’re making progress, then?”

“Uh. I guess?”

“And you don’t want to stop because you’re afraid you’ll lose momentum, right?”

He was about to refute that, but realized she was right. Every time he left his lab for a long period of time, he lost track of where he was in his projects. They’d sit on some shelf somewhere for months, and he’d end up scraping them for parts.

“Maybe,” he said, effectively admitting it. Why did she have to make him feel like a little kid? And why did it _work_?

tipsyGnostalgic: what did she do when she discovered ur bombthreat collection???  
zKazinski: She ended up piling them all on the masked woman’s corpse and leaving it in the streets.  
Kid_Win: What the hell?  
zKazinski: Most of them were soaked, and apparently could have been used to track my location with divinations. So pretty much useless.  
zKazinski: The Aranea decided to investigate the invasion based on my fliers, though.  
zKazinski: And went with mine and Ino’s plan to alert everyone.  
Kid_Win: Why?  
zKazinski: It was already in motion, and more importantly it’s the best way to stop the invasion without drawing attention to themselves.  
zKazinski: A body covered in the same suspicious threats that everyone was talking about?  
zKazinski: It moves investigations up from ‘possible prank’ really quick.  
tipsyGnostalgic: huh  


  
“How about this: You leave the portal in the system here. I’ll check out a laptop for you to bring home, and we’ll blueprint and work on code there.”

He gave a short nod. It was the best he was going to get. “Do you know why they’re sending us home?” he asked.

“I think it’s a mix of the facility’s staff not wanting to work over the holidays and a few minor renovations.”

“So no more meetings about me, then?”

“Not for now. There’s been enough discussion on you to determine that your friends are out of PRT jurisdiction until they can affect our world without going through you. So long as you can cut them off, they’re simply being treated as a power you don’t have full control over. Same as parahumans with powers tied to their emotions.”

That was as decent of an explanation as any.

“They’re awfully good at making up easy solutions that just barely fit the problem, aren’t they?”

She laughed softly. “Parahuman powers manifest differently for everyone, so their systems are versatile. If they just pretend the Node is a power that connects you to parahumans from other Earths, it’s easier to label it and build a plan around it based on prior experience. I’m sure aliens could invade, and they’d simply give them a ‘Tinker 7’ label to make it easier to plan around.”

tipsyGnostalgic: ok so now weve heard all the hears bout eye spider  
tipsyGnostalgic: NEXT!!  
tipsyGnostalgic: were getting some quick snips on these spids  
tipsyGnostalgic: like speeddatin but just for getting spider gossip  
zKazinski: Hmm...  
zKazinski: Seeker of Novelty is really friendly, a bit too friendly.  
zKazinski: Except that time she tried to poke my stab wound.  
zKazinski: That wasn’t friendly at all.  
Kid_Win: I remember that.  
Kid_Win: I thought she was a doctor coming to inspect your wound.  
tipsyGnostalgic: isnt she the one that says shes gonna be your teacher when ur done with psychic preschool/bootcamp  
zKazinski: That one, yeah.  
tipsyGnostalgic: tell us more then!!!!!  


  
Chris and Dragon chatted for a while longer on the PRT and his situation. She put pieces into place that made him understand what was going on in much greater detail. His biggest proponents were Watchdog and the higher-ups of the PRT, especially the Chief Director. Dragon thought that she ordered the Wards to move away from PRT control because she didn’t trust Piggot to handle the situation delicately enough.

Dragon herself pushed for Guild influence on the situation, and she admitted it probably only went through because Costa-Brown saw an opportunity to better the Protectorate and add a bullet point to her own argument. Politics.

His phone buzzed. Dean had sent a text offering him, Dennis, and Carlos a chance to hang out at his place after Christmas. He sent a message back, and pocketed the phone. Things wouldn't be _that_ bad.


	8. A Huntress in Purple (Arc 1)

Ino examined a pair of sandals and placed them back on the shelf after seeing the price-tag. She didn’t even intend to buy anything in this village, but she found herself shopping anyway. It gave her something to keep busy with while Asuma and Shikamaru did all the real tracking. Or ‘information gathering’, in Shikamaru’s words.

Their plan was to just talk to civilians and deduce where the target might be based on that. They’d visited a few ranches where animals had been picked off, met with hunters in bars, and talked with just about everyone who might know something. Ino tried to contribute but eventually gave up when she decided that extracting useful information through her social expertise wasn’t needed when people _wanted_ ninja to solve all their problems for them.

Also, Asuma was better at it than she was, and she very slightly resented that. Just a smidgen.

When she felt sick enough of looking at what amounted to wearable garbage in the only shoe-store in town, she made her way out of the shop and dug through the bag of books she brought with her for the journey. A few of the books she had already perfectly copied to her memory thanks to Zorian’s advice. The ones she hadn’t gotten to yet were either on specific subjects or a random collection of adventure novels that came with the bundle. Something about the author’s long history as a ‘writer of many strokes’.

Private Channel with zKazinski  
Ino!: Hey, Zorian.  
Ino!: You holding up well?  
zKazinski: I am.  
zKazinski: It’s relieving to know that getting repeatedly stabbed and then rescued/kidnapped by telepathic spiders is only a minor complication.  
Ino!: You’re getting FREE MENTAL TECHNIQUES!  
Ino!: How is that a complication?  
zKazinski: I never said getting mind magic was a complication.  
Ino!: Yes you did!  
zKazinski: No, I said being stabbed was a complication.  
zKazinski: Aranean mental magic is useful for both of us, but I don’t know how much I can learn before the month restarts.  
Ino!: Just come back and learn more next month, then!  
zKazinski: I have no clue how much of my current arrangement has to do with the fact that they pity me for being almost bleeding out on their front doorstep.  
Ino!: You always make these things so hard, Zori!  
Ino!: Just try approaching them different ways each month, until you find a trick that gets them to help  
zKazinski: I’ve thought of that, and obviously I’ll do it.  
zKazinski: But that’s a more long-term solution.  
zKazinski: You know my worries about the end of the month.  
zKazinski: Though that worry seems much smaller having now became the victim of a sewer-stabbing.  
Ino!: You got some benefit from it, at least.  
zKazinski: It remains a complication.  


  
“You! The shinobi!”

Ino looked over at an older man scrambling down the street.

“Your team’s here to hunt the monster in the woods, right?”

Ino gave a quick nod.

“It just did an attack on my ranch, please hurry!”

It took a bit of effort to calm the man down, but she managed to track down her team and bring them together to meet with the increasingly distraught man. They traveled together out of the village and into the countryside, while the man described the scene of the attack.

Shikamaru and Asuma quickly lost interest in his recollection of the scene. They apparently thought it a situation in need of more discerning eyes than those of a random villager. Ino didn’t agree with that, and she listened carefully. Shikamaru was smart, but a detective he was not.

When they arrived, it was just as he described it. A bit of gore, trampled ground, and a trail of blood. The cat took the whole ox. More critically, it took his largest, most prized cow, and it _dragged it away_. She didn’t doubt its strength, it being much bigger than the ox, but why did it need to move its meal, especially if it was starving as badly as they expected?

She knew nothing could get between a ravenous beast and its meal. She’d seen Choji hungry, after all.

zKazinski: Oh, Spear of Resolve has some more questions about your techniques.  
Ino!: Okay, I’m ready for anything.  
zKazinski: “Your abilities are based on overwhelming your target’s ‘spiritual energy’ with your own.”  
zKazinski: “By contrast, we go through a great web of information and connections.”  
zKazinski: “Can your abilities be used remotely?”  
Ino!: Not really, no!  
Ino!: We operate solely through chakra, which means that everything we do has to reach the other person!  
Ino!: A lot of the Yamanaka fighting style is based on trying to restrain people’s movements so we can actually hit them.  
zKazinski: “Then do your capabilities not grant you extrasensory prowess?”  
Ino!: You mean like special vision powers?  
zKazinski: She means more like divinations.  
Ino!: Divinations?  
zKazinski: Techniques that can be used to gather information, outside of mental techniques.  
Ino!: The Yamanaka are closely tied to the intel departments in Konoha.  
Ino!: So we might, but I would have to check.  
zKazinski: “I see. Do you believe that your techniques could work on someone without ‘chakra’?”  
Ino!: That’s tied heavily to our understanding of the mind.  
Ino!: I was raised believing that independent thought required spiritual energy.  
Ino!: But apparently you, Roxy, and Chris can all think without it.  
Ino!: I think that my thoughts come from the connection between my spiritual energy and my brain.  
Ino!: That’s the only explanation I can come up with to solve this problem.  
zKazinski: That doesn’t answer her question.  
Ino!: UGH.  
Ino!: Spiritual energy uses the chakra network in the brain to derive consciousness.  
Ino!: So I’d assume that if you don’t have a chakra network, there’s nothing for my techniques to mesh with.  
zKazinski: So our conclusion is that because you don’t have a psychic background field and we don’t have chakra networks, our techniques are incompatible fundamentally.  
zKazinski: Right?  


  
The boys — at this point Ino was seriously questioning her purpose on this mission — quickly found the trail and began to track the giant cat into the woods. The forests here were thick, but they often abruptly ended at the borders of large fields and valleys. Shikamaru suspected that the panther wandered here by following the most shadowy and dense sections of the forest and only decided to stop when it found a place with both places to hide and herds of prey in abundance.

They eventually found their target under the darkest foliage, surrounded by dozens of animal bodies stripped down to bone. It was huge, easily twelve feet long, with sleek midnight black fur stained red around the mouth. It was tearing into the ox, desperately trying to get its fill.

“Hey, Asuma,” said Ino, “she just had kittens.”

Asuma looked more closely at the panther. Ino waited for him to notice the swollen teats on her underside. He nodded once in acknowledgement and motioned for the team to take positions around it. Ino stayed low to the ground, while the others hid in the treetops. Their formation left it closest to her, but there wasn’t anything to fear. Her team had her back.

Ino!: I hope not.  
Ino!: That would SUCK.  
zKazinski: I don’t think so. Chakra and mana are too different.  
zKazinski: Mana is controlled by the soul, chakra is controlled by the body.  
zKazinski: Chakra is more symbolic, while mana is more material.  
zKazinski: I have a lot of difficulty figuring out how chakra works.  
Ino!: I think they both make sense, but mana is more like a big math problem and chakra is more like poetry.  
Ino!: That’s why we have attacks in the shape of dragons and some of our seals have the purpose of the seal written in huge letters in the middle.  
Ino!: Have you noticed that Chris has a harder time working with chakra except by recreating existing seals?  
zKazinski: Yes, but you’ve clearly never seen me work with potions if you think mana isn’t as symbolic.  
Ino!: I’ve heard your ‘Roxy doesn’t do real alchemy’ rants before, I know a lot on the subject.  
zKazinski: I’d like to think that I’ve made peace with the differences in our alchemies. Ino!: Sure you have.  
Ino!: But I think the big thing chakra and mana have in common is holding the user’s willpower, and reacting to it.  
zKazinski: Hmm. That would explain all the similarities.  
zKazinski: Even if they’re very different in other regards, they both hold information and react to it.  
Ino!: Do you think we could transfer information between them?  
zKazinski: You mean convert spells to ninjutsu and vice versa?  
Ino!: Yeah!  
zKazinski: I’m interested.  
Ino!: We need Chris for this talk.  
Ino!: He’ll enjoy it a lot.  
zKazinski: I’ll make a room for us to talk about it in.  


  
Ino moved her hands in front of her face, and channeled her mind towards the panther. A familiar void enveloped her. The panther was willful, fighting against her. It took a few moments for her energies to take control of the giant chakra-infused beast. It was strong, and it was very, very hungry.

She climbed to all fours and looked up at Asuma. A quick nod was all he needed to confirm the capture. Choji leaped down, and pulled Ino’s limp body over his shoulder.

“So, how are we going to get it home?” asked Shikamaru. They stared at the panther, examining it carefully. “We aren’t just going to have Ino walk it home, are we?”

“Actually, I think that’s exactly what we’ll do,” replied Asuma, “It would destroy any temporary seals we put it in, and I’m not carrying it.”

Ino looked at the ox’s corpse, then at Asuma as if to ask about food. His eyes darted to Choji, who paled slightly.

“She isn’t going to eat you,” said Shikamaru, prompting a small sigh of relief from Choji. “Just your extra food-pills.”

Choji whined extensively about that, but gave up a small pile of them anyway. The pills aided in chakra regeneration, and a single pill would be enough to substitute a day’s rations for a normal ninja. Ino swallowed the whole batch in one bite.

Choji put Ino’s unconscious body on the panther’s back, and strapped her down. Shikamaru tried to get them to move on, but Asuma stopped him. “We should look for the kittens too,” he said. Ino agreed; it would be a shame to take a mother away from her babies like that.

The four of them split in different directions, searching for the den.

Research Project Channel  
Ino!: CHRIS!  
Kid_Win: Hey!  
Ino!: We need your help with something!!!  
Ino!: We know you’ve been bored without your lab, so we decided to ask you about making something with us.  
Kid_Win: Hold up a moment.  
Kid_Win: That sounds nice _but_.  
Kid_Win: Are you a giant tiger right now?  
zKazinski: No, she’s a giant panther.  
Kid_Win: Oh, that’s a relief.  
Kid_Win: Generally people themed around tigers are bad news.  
zKazinski: That’s probably reasonable.  
Kid_Win: Give me a breakdown of the situation?  
zKazinski: Mana makes sense, but the rules that govern chakra might as well not exist.  
zKazinski: We want your help figuring out how to translate techniques between them.  
Kid_Win: Sounds simple enough.  
Kid_Win: I’ll just solve world hunger real quick and get right on that.  
Ino!: We think there’s a way you can use your science on them to make our techniques compatible.  
Kid_Win: Based on my experiments, I’m not sure that’s possible?  
Kid_Win: They’re too different.  
Kid_Win: Unless you find a way to convert one to the other, it might not be doable at all.  
Ino!: So a technique that turns into a spell after it’s been cast?  
Kid_Win: Something like that.  
Kid_Win: I’ve been talking to another tinker about doing a trade for a generator that can supposedly synthesize any sort of energy so long as it has a sample to work with.  
zKazinski: And you think this technology would be helpful in understanding the conversion between mana and chakra?  
Kid_Win: Maybe?  
Kid_Win: Tinkertech is more inscrutable than normal technology, and trying to reverse-engineer a solution from anything made by a tinker _might_ not be possible.  
Kid_Win: It’s happened a few times, but not often.  
Kid_Win: And I don’t think you want a machine so much as a replicable technique, right?  
zKazinski: That’s exactly what we want.  
Kid_Win: The fact that we don’t have magic in my world means that a tinker building something abstract like a ‘spell’ hasn’t really been attempted.  
Ino!: You’ve been looking at the principles of sealing from my memory, right?  
Kid_Win: A bit, yeah.  
zKazinski: And you also know some stuff about making potions and items with spell formula from me.  
Kid_Win: The math involved is disgusting, but yes.  
zKazinski: The big difference is putting it through a different lens, then.  
zKazinski: You can work with our energies on items, so you could extrapolate to general techniques and spells, right?  
Kid_Win: I still don’t know if I can do that. Tinker powers are fickle.  
Kid_Win: I heard of one guy who could make energy swords, but not energy shields.  
Kid_Win: It’s almost arbitrary what my powers give me.  
Kid_Win: We’re given instructions on how to make something and a varying amount of understanding of what we’re doing.  
Kid_Win: If we do this, we’ll need Dragon’s help. She understands my tech better than I do.  
Ino!: Why don’t you give it a try, then?  
Ino!: Zorian could probably help you try to make a new spell, just to see if you can do it!  
Ino!: Then we’ll see if we can make ninjutsu, too.  
Kid_Win: Okay, sure.  
Kid_Win: One of the few kinds of tinkering I can do without my lab, I guess.  
zKazinski: So our plan is simple:  
zKazinski: First we figure out if we can create new spells/techniques with Chris’s power (possibly using spell formula and sealing as a starting point), and from there we experiment with converting mana and chakra?  
Kid_Win: Among other things, but yes.  
Ino!: I’m all in!  


  
Ino was sniffing her way through the forests. The panther had a strong nose. It had strong everything, really, and this sort of power was something she could’ve gotten used to if it wasn’t for the shaking limbs and gnawing hunger. The food-pills were doing wonders for regenerating chakra, but they couldn’t digest quickly enough.

She walked through the forests. The den would be low to the ground, and she hadn’t found her legs for tree climbing in a cat’s body yet. Worst of all, she didn’t even know what panther kittens smelled like. The only smell she could follow that stood out in the forest was the smell of musty cloth and ink, and she followed that smell.

In the hollow of a tree, she found a small pack hidden away. She took it into her mouth to lay it on the ground. It might have been some sort of supply cache or something?

She opted to take it back to where they split up, so that somebody with working thumbs could check it out. If it was just a hunter’s spare supplies or something, she’d put it back.

Asuma and Shikamaru were the next to arrive back after her. They apparently hadn’t found anything either, but they were happy to look through the bag when she dropped it in their laps.

The first thing they pulled out was a tube holding a scroll of coded messages. The same was true for the second scroll, and the third and fourth. The fifth scroll was different — a complete map of the the Hidden Leaf village. Asuma was more than a little shocked to see it and pulled it close to himself to look over it more closely. His eyes went over the map several times, and then he rolled the map closed and put it back in the container.

“Security breach,” he said, “We need to report back to the Leaf, now.” He handed them the bag and its contents. “Shikamaru, Ino — Go find Choji and get moving. I’ll get payment from the villagers and catch up with you on the return trip.”

Ino and Shikamaru rushed in the direction Choji went to do his search. Ino managed to find him near a massive fallen tree, looking into a gap beneath the tree and the ground. She let out a small roar to get his attention, causing him to slip and turn to look at her. She pawed her face.

“Oh! Ino! I found them.”

She approached the den, and looked under it with him. The panther was disgruntled, fighting back against her to protect her litter, but Ino’s will was far stronger. Choji was blissfully unaware of the battle of minds raging in the big cat over whether the panther got to gut him like a fish.

Under the log, she saw five adorable little cubs. None of them had the solid black of their mother, being of the more normal spotted variety. They were still huge, though, and they excitedly flopped over one another to approach who they thought was their mother.

She gave Choji a nod, and they started putting the cubs in a large cloth bag. They were feisty little guys. Shikamaru caught up with them and explained the situation to Choji. She snarled at him when he said something along the lines of ‘For once I’m sorry she can’t talk’. He didn’t do it again.

They started back in the direction of the Hidden Leaf. Choji and Shikamaru took to the trees, and Ino stuck to the ground.

She got back to work on the transcription project. She had memorized all the pages of the books but hadn’t transcribed them all into the readable format yet. It was something to do on the way back home. Before, she could talk with Shikamaru about a ‘hypothetical invasion on a hypothetical city’, but now she couldn’t even talk normally.

Roxy would probably want to talk about her being a giant cat, right?

The smell of people started to catch up with her. She glanced behind her and saw nobody, but the scent grew closer and closer. She lets out a whine, and looked over her shoulder. Shikamaru took the hint.

“We’ve got a tail.”

Ino nodded.

“Choji, there’s a river just ahead. Ino probably can’t water walk like that, so you’ll need to take her body. Ino, get out of the cat.”

A large needle hit the ground just ahead of her. She made the executive decision to stay in the panther and keep moving.

Shikamaru decided that it made more sense to stop and face them in the woods. Ino stopped and prepared to follow his lead. She dodged a fast-moving glint of light, which revealed itself to be a shuriken after it buried itself into a tree.

“Enemy ninja,” Shikamaru said. Funny how him saying something so obvious could have such weight.

They found something from another village, and they were being attacked for it. Shikamaru and Choji prepared themselves by taking on a stance. Everything was quiet. That wasn’t a good thing.

Kid_Win: Ino?  
Kid_Win: What’s going on?  
Ino!: Enemy ninja.  


  
Shikamaru did _something_ , causing a clang of metal. Deflected a projectile? Whatever he did, he managed to point out where the attack came from. Just a little bit of information like that would be enough for him. 

zKazinski: Do you think you’re in danger?  
Ino!: Yes.  
Ino!: If you haven’t noticed, I can’t use my jutsu.  
Ino!: I’m in a cat.  


  
A figure charged in at Ino, wildly swinging a blade. She was forced back to avoid the swing, and she saw a boy not much older than her. His headband had the symbol of a music note, and a scowl on his face.

“I think you have something of ours,” he said.

“A dead drop?” asked Shikamaru, “You really shouldn’t be stealing intel from your allies.”

“Doesn’t matter. Give us the package and we’ll make this quick.” The boy held out his arm, and pointed it at Ino. “This cat one of yours?”

Ino snarled.

The boy’s arm made a sucking sound and a tiny shimmer of air formed around a hole in his palm. Ino moved again, avoiding an ear-piercing blast of air that cut the ground where she was standing to ribbons.

Kid_Win: Does that guy have arm cannons?  
Ino!: Not any bloodline I’ve ever heard of.  
Kid_Win: I didn’t think they would be.  
Kid_Win: That’s just a cyborg ninja.  


  
She rushed, ramming her shoulder into him. He barreled over backwards, rolling through the dirt. He managed to push off the ground with his shoulder blade, land on his feet and blasted another wave of air. The attack glanced her side, sending pain through the panther’s body. Its mind reeled and fought for control, but Ino held fast.

Ino lunged back at him, and he rolled out of the way. She felt some weight come off her shoulders, and she heard sounds of combat in the treetops, but ignored it in favor of targeting the other ninja. He leaped back, forcing her to charge at him. He managed to narrowly sidestep her lunge, setting him behind her.

zKazinski: Your body!  


  
Ino turned around and felt the mass of straps that once held her body to the panther drag loosely against the ground. Behind her, the other ninja had his hand pressed against her unconscious self’s throat. Something jingled in the treetops above. Ino didn’t move a muscle.

“Well, looks like the kitty knows not to get her master hurt. Now give up the scrolls.”

Ino!: He cut my straps.  
Ino!: The bastard!!!!  


  
She stared at him for a moment, before reaching around to grab the bag hooked to her with her mouth. She cautiously lowered it onto the ground, and stepped backwards away from it. He stood up, keeping one hand trained on her body, stepped forward to pick up the bag.

Choji gave a moan of pain above, and she heard a thud onto the ground. She didn’t dare turn around, no matter how much she wanted to.

“Ino!” came Shikamaru’s voice, “They won’t let us get out of this!”

The sound ninja gave her a small smile, and she heard a tiny click and the woosh of air from the arm trained on her body. “He’s smarter than he looks.”

Ino!: /mindShare off  


  
She pounced. He almost managed to avoid it, but her claw caught him and yanked him to the ground. He struggled, pointing his arm into her chest. She pulled back, but her claw was tangled into his clothes and dug into his skin. He was dragged with her, wildly aiming a shot that she was forced to duck under.

He stumbled to his feet, and pointed his arm at Ino’s body again. He breathed steadily. Through the sensitive ears of the panther, she could hear the slight sucking noise from his arm. He was charging it so slowly as to be almost inaudible, but she knew the weapon was arming itself.

“Okay, you win. Do you want the bag back?” he said, shrugging the pack from his shoulder and holding it out. He was stalling.

The tiny _click_ saw Ino launching herself into him, ramming the boy’s body into the ground and pinning him beneath her. She swiped at him.

zKazinski: Ino?  


  
Ino pulled her paw out of the warm, wet mass. Blood dribbled on the ground. 

zKazinski: Are you there?  


  
For some reason, the squirming sack of kittens strapped to her side was the most prominent sensation for a few seconds. They stood out to her in a way that the ninja screaming for help and thrashing under her couldn’t. Why she didn’t tear her eyes away from him, but felt the kittens more, she didn’t know.

He lifted his arm to release a spiteful final blast at her, having forgotten her physical body in his death throes. She leapt out of the way of the attack, and he was rolled over onto his side by the force of her jumping off his chest. His innards spilled out.

She ignored her victim’s final, wet cough, and ran over to Choji’s side. She could feel dirt clumping in the bloodied paw.

Choji groaned. His ankle was twisted. There was a nasty cut on his arm. Recoverable, safe. She nuzzled into him for a moment just to let him know she was there.

Kid_Win: Ino, please say something.  
Ino!: I’m here.

  
The sound of combat above ceased. Ino saw a figure retreating through the treetops. Shikamaru dropped down. She saw a needle sunk deep into his forearm.

“Ino, are you alright?”

She gave him a nod.

Ino!: I almost died.  
Ino!: I’m okay though.  
Kid_Win: What happened?  
Ino!: Uh.  
Ino!: Let me calm down first.  
Ino!: I don’t think I can talk about it like this.  
Kid_Win: Okay.  


  
“We need to move. They found out about us sooner than we expected. Asuma can catch up with us easily.”

Shikamaru loaded both Choji’s and Ino’s bodies onto her back. She tried to keep her eyes off the Sound ninja’s corpse. She thought Choji and Shikamaru were doing the same thing. When they started on the move again, it was in silence.

Ino wasn’t ready to follow up with anybody in the Node yet. She still needed time to think about what happened. Why were a group of ninja from an allied village so desperate to protect that information? Ino scratched that line of thought quickly. It was obvious that they were planning something.

She thought about her discussions with Zorian about his actions. Everything lined up for some sort of infiltration. An invasion, a bloodline theft, a raid for techniques, or something of that sort. But from an allied village?

It was... bold. It spoke a lot of how the village wished to be seen by friend and foe alike. This was the sort of thing that could blow up into a full-fledged war. Going down in history as drawing first blood in a war between the Leaf and Sound was a dizzying concept.

She tried to turn her mind away from it all. Every time she thought about it, her heart raced and the world felt a bit more confusing. War drums pounded in her ears and she wanted them to stop. It was easier to focus on running. Chris, Roxy, and Zorian didn’t know what she did. It didn’t feel like she knew what she did either. It wasn’t her claws that killed that boy, but it was still her who did it.

They were supposed to have been allies, right? Was this going to end up being the tragedy that spiraled into a war?

Choji shifted on her back and said something. Shikamaru chuckled, darkly. Ino wished she could say something, too. She would give them a bit of support, keep their minds off the fight and what they certainly knew to be the start of a huge incident.

Instead, all she could do was push forward with hunger wracking her body and the wound on her side stinging. That memory of the Sound ninja laying dead kept surfacing, and everyone in the Node kept checking in on her. Ino tried to busy herself with transcribing the sealing books, but it wasn’t working. The panther was getting riled up, fighting back against her, and for once she found herself wavering.

She didn’t want to lose control. Control was how she kept herself safe in that fight. She looked over the books again, hoping to find a book less boring. Something that would keep her from losing the slow mental war against her own doubt and a big damn panther. She looked through Zorian’s collection and a few of the things Chris had saved. It was all technical documents. Her own collections were much the same. Except...

Children’s adventure novels it was, then.

She looked at her memory of the pages. Funny how foggy it was that morning; it seemed far more reflective of her mood than the clear sunset. This was the sort of weather reserved for triumphant victories, right? Not whatever just happened.

The first page revealed a bit of story she thought was hysterical — the main character of the book was named _Naruto_. She couldn’t get the picture of the idiot from her village out of her head until they finally described the main character, who was relievingly hunky.

She started going through the book. The forest passed, and she just focused on the memories of the pages. It wasn’t exactly cutting-edge in the prose department. She was raised on the higher arts of traditional poetry and teen magazines, so she could spot the little disjointed lines and odd phrases.

Still, it kept her mind busy. And hidden in the words, she saw signs that the author had experienced the life of a ninja firsthand. The little realities kept surfacing, even if the word ‘chakra’ never appeared once. She was constantly reminded that this was written by a legendary ninja, and at times she could see things described so clearly that she wondered if the book was partially autobiographical.

One particular fight scene cemented that idea for her. In the moment, it almost felt too real. Having lived through such an encounter made it easier to imagine the battle even where it was sparsely described. She wondered if the scene could ever hold value to somebody who hadn’t ‘been there’, at least emotionally. And whenever she thought it was done, the book kept pushing her.

It started to transform into a sort of discussion, where the main character would think or do something about war or violence, and Ino would have to fight back guilt just to hear it out. The plot was still there, and the writing was still amateur, but at a certain point she was more engaged with the author’s own internal struggle bleeding into the pages. When she got to the end, she was disappointed to discover that it never gave her an answer on how peace could be brought to the world.

It never gave up on the possibility of there being an answer, though. She clung to that.

❖

All was well in the Hidden Leaf.

Ino was welcomed home a small hero for fighting valiantly. She kept her mouth closed and nodded when the subject was brought up. Her dad comforted her that night while she cried in his arms.

The panther developed an infection on the trip back home. It was already weak from chakra exhaustion, and adding on the fight with the Sound ninja, its recent pregnancy, and the strain of being forced to double-time back home left it direly ill. The Inuzuka veterinarian they brought it to didn’t expect it to make it through the week. It would die of chakra exhaustion if it stayed in the clinic, or it would die of the infection in the wild.

They decided to release it back into the forest, where it could die peacefully. Ino thought something about that felt wrong. It fought so hard to keep its children alive, and but they would probably starve without her to nurse them. After much begging, the Inuzuka let her take care of one of the kittens until it could eat solid food. Her parents even let her keep it in her room. It took much longer than it normally would for her to realize that them letting her watch it wasn’t about _its_ health.

She used the paycheck from the mission well, buying a bunch of supplies for making seals and tinkering with Chris. Shikamaru practically gave her his portion of the money, mumbling something about ‘using resources for the benefit of the team’.

At some point, she felt less guilt over the battle, if only because she was guilty over ignoring the Node for so long.

Private Channel with zKazinski  
Ino!: Hey, you there?  
zKazinski: Yeah, I’m here.  
Ino!: Sorry I’ve been so distant lately.  
zKazinski: I don’t blame you.  
zKazinski: Almost dying sucked.  
Ino!: Yeah.  
Ino!: I couldn’t handle the thoughts of you guys seeing me die through my eyes.  
Ino!: So I just shut it down.  
zKazinski: I wish I thought of that.  
zKazinski: I have a question, and it might a bit weird.  
zKazinski: Did you die?  
Ino!: No????  
Ino!: I’m still perfectly alive.  
Ino!: Tip-top shape, really!!!  
zKazinski: Right, sorry.  
zKazinski: You’ve just left your sense sharing off since the fight, and I assumed you didn’t want us to see the aftermath.  
zKazinski: But you just kept it off, and I thought about the time Thunder mentioned how the Node keeps connected to you even in the afterlife.  
zKazinski: I connected dots that might not exist, I guess.  
Ino!: Oh. Sorry.  
Ino!: I guess it’s only fair that you go through that after what you did to us, though!  
Ino!: /mindShare on  


  
Ino sat up in her bed, yawning a bit while she dragged her feet to the ground. She giggled a bit when Zorian yawned in kind. The cub perked up slightly at her passing and began merrily trotting around her, trying to nip at her toes.

Ino gently pushed her aside with her foot. She poured a bowl of milk and mushed up a few food-pills into it. She stood up to fill a pot up with water and put it on the stove. She dug through the fridge, grabbing a few vegetables. She had to reference those nutrition charts Chris sent her again, and carefully measured out a bit of meat from the fridge. She grabbed a knife and got to work.

Ino!: Almost dying sucks, huh?  
zKazinski: Oh, I can relate to that.  
zKazinski: It’s something we can bitch about together, though, right?  
Ino!: Hasn’t Roxy _actually_ died before?  
zKazinski: It doesn’t count if you come back.  
zKazinski: You don’t get that experience of having to come down from the associated vertigo.  
zKazinski: She probably just came back all relieved to be alive, which is unrelatable on a royal scale.  
Ino!: Ha!  
Ino!: You make it sound like she got off better than us.  
zKazinski: I wouldn’t deny such an assertion.  
Ino!: You know, I keep thinking back to how cool it felt to be a panther?  
Ino!: It was amazing.  
Ino!: Even in close combat I was unstoppable.  
Ino!: Dodging around and stuff was the easiest thing in the world, and did you see how clear my vision was?  
zKazinski: Your vision’s always clear.  
Ino!: You’re just mad because you wear glasses!  
Ino!: I wish that part of the whole thing was the one that stuck with me.  
zKazinski: I can’t imagine living my life like you guys do.  
zKazinski: The whole ‘always at risk of dying’ thing is a lot less appealing as of late.  
Ino!: Yup.  
Ino!: You know, we’re raised with this idea that we have to be willing to die?  
Ino!: Not that dying is a good thing. It’s very bad.  
Ino!: But we’re supposed to be brave in the face of violence.  
Ino!: But I must have missed class that day or something, because obviously that lesson didn’t stick very well.  
zKazinski: It’s something to work through, I suppose.  
Ino!: Yeah. I’m doing better today than yesterday.  
zKazinski: How did you survive, anyways?  
Ino!: I stalled until Asuma caught up and saved me. It was really tense.  
zKazinski: A tried-and-true method.  
Ino!: I learned from the best, obviously.  
zKazinski: The big difference between your attempt and mine is that I actually got stabbed and left to bleed out, but you came out alright.  
zKazinski: I’m glad it went better for you than me, though.  


  
Her knife slipped slightly. As if just getting hurt made his situation worse than hers, right? He at least made allies out of his incident, but Ino would have to carry things that would follow her for longer than a month.

She kept chopping as though nothing was wrong, but Zorian seemed to notice. She smiled a little, and his concern seemed to slip away.

Ino!: It was rough, I’ll admit.  
Ino!: I wasn’t doing my best after it happened.  
zKazinski: That’s understandable.  
zKazinski: I was in a rough spot too, except it was less emotional turmoil and more of a magically induced medical coma.  
zKazinski: So what was the deal with that package?  
Ino!: Some sort of spy data from the village.  
Ino!: Everyone thinks the panther got away from the village using the same route the spies had developed to get in, which lead us to the dead-drop.  
zKazinski: And the spies chased after you when you took the bag, right?  
Ino!: No, the ninja who were picking up the messages caught up to us after they discovered it missing.  
Ino!: We weren’t watching our tracks because it was so important to get the message back.  
zKazinski: And you were also possessing a giant cat.  
Ino!: And I was also possessing a giant cat.  
Ino!: It was good luck we found the package; bad luck we also found the genin assigned to pick it up.  
Ino!: So, how about you?  
zKazinski: What?  
Ino!: How did the woman with the knife catch you?  
zKazinski: Divinations.  
zKazinski: The aranea are good with those, especially the scout that saved me.  
zKazinski: Green robe lady had apparently been using a spell to find fliers that matched the ones I made and was following me using that.  
Ino!: “Green robe lady”.  
Ino!: It was such an ugly shade that it barely qualifies as green!  
Ino!: Calling her that is giving her too much credit.  
zKazinski: Calling somebody by a distinctive clothing color is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  
Ino!: Then call her puke lady or something.  
Ino!: It’d describe her better.  


  
Ino moved on to chop some pork, trying not to become too uncomfortable with the touch of the wet meat. It wasn’t warm or very bloody, which was good. She tried to focus on that. It was cold, not warm. Cool to the touch, like wind-chilled blood clinging in her fur-

She put the knife down, ran some water over her hands, and starting digging through the fridge for something else to prepare. Zorian had the good sense not to comment on it. She didn’t find anything, so she instead began raiding every nook and cranny that she knew would have spices. Pouring little samples of each on her finger, she tested each one until she found a few she liked, and gathered them up to mix into the soup.

She and Zorian chatted on idly, letting the subject drift from mortality and the like. It made the cooking pass more quickly. Conversations eventually died, and she was on her own again. But she had blown her Node off long enough, and she wasn’t going to ignore them any longer.

Private Channel with Kid_Win  
Ino!: Hey!  
Kid_Win: Ino!  
Kid_Win: Glad you’re back.  
Kid_Win: I see that you’re making delicious Japanese food.  
Ino!: You’re about to say something about either making sushi or tinkering with me because you’re bored, right?  
Kid_Win: You’re no fun.  
Kid_Win: The second one.  
Ino!: Good timing, then!  
Ino!: I just finished setting up one of the old gardening sheds as a workshop!  
Kid_Win: I’m excited.  
Kid_Win: What sorts of machines did you get for it.  
Ino!: Uh, a hammer.  
Ino!: Some nails, a screwdriver.  
Ino!: I found a pair of pliers with a purple grip!  
Kid_Win: That’s it?  
Ino!: Yep.  
Kid_Win: Uh.  
Ino!: I know it’s not enough, I wanted to go shopping with you.  
Ino!: So I can learn what scientists buy.  
Kid_Win: Oh, that’s a lot better.  
Ino!: But let’s talk about making my gun idea.  
Ino!: We’re absolutely certain it’ll be safe, right?  
Kid_Win: Probably?  
Ino!: Yes or no.  
Kid_Win: We’ll figuring something out.  
Ino!: UGH.  
Ino!: Fine.  
Ino!: Promise?  
Kid_Win: Promise.  
Kid_Win: So let’s get started with prototyping.  
Ino!: Prototyping?  
Kid_Win: Building some test weapons before the actual thing.  
Kid_Win: Trying to build a weapon without experimenting is dumb.  
Kid_Win: It’d be like trying to learn to paint, but wanting to start off making your magnum opus.  
Kid_Win: It’s not reasonable.  
Ino!: Right, okay.  
Ino!: I looked at those designs you showed me, and I’m not sure if we should use seals to propel the bullets.  
Kid_Win: Why not?  
Ino!: You’re awful at seals.  
Kid_Win: Sure, but you’re not.  
Ino!: I am. I’m better than you, but I’m still new to them.  
Kid_Win: Okay, well the first thing that should go in your workshop is a sealing station.  
Ino!: Already done!  
Kid_Win: Not with my enhancements, its not.  
Ino!: Enhancements?  
Kid_Win: How good is computer technology on your world?  
Ino!: Uh, they’re not super common. I know they’re used sometimes in labs, but the giant power infrastructure and internet thing that they have on your world would be too prone to sabotage and other attacks.  
Ino!: So we don’t have them.  
Kid_Win: Well, you’re going to need one.  
Ino!: Why?  
Kid_Win: Because me and Dragon have been working on a way to digitally design and print seals.  
Ino!: And you want me to help you with this machine?  
Kid_Win: We want your whole clan to help us.  
Ino!: You mean actually tell them?  
Ino!: About EVERYTHING?????  
Kid_Win: Yeah, or at least a few.  
Ino!: I don’t know if that’s a good idea...  
Kid_Win: Oh really?  
Kid_Win: Because Zorian seems to think you were planning on doing it soon, so that he doesn’t have to keep bargaining with the Aranea.  
Kid_Win: The fact of the matter is either you give Zorian permission to show the Aranea your techniques in more detail with your clan’s support, or he does it without your clan’s support.  
Kid_Win: He’s not admitting it, but he’s in a tight situation.  
Ino!: I figured as much.  
Ino!: His caretakers had a bargaining chip over him from the start, but he’s not been able to hold up his end of the deal.  
Ino!: They’re probably getting impatient.  
Kid_Win: Knowing a weird army will be using my city as an access tunnel to another city with the express purpose of invading it would make me impatient too.  
Ino!: So why isn’t he saying anything to me about the thing?  
Kid_Win: For one, he’s not good with people. He’s all pissy because he got stabbed and now he copes by being sarcastic about everything.  
Ino!: I thought he was trying to use humor as a defense?  
Ino!: Not just sarcasm.  
Kid_Win: Maybe?  
Kid_Win: He’s not as explicitly bitter as I’d be in his situation.  
Kid_Win: Waiting for the month to end, bedbound, not knowing what will happen.  
Kid_Win: It’s gotta suck.  
Ino!: Yeah.  
Ino!: Uh.  
Ino!: This feels a bit gossip-y.  
Kid_Win: It is a bit.  
Kid_Win: But it’s not like we’re slandering him.  
Kid_Win: We’re just working out how to be the best friends we can for him.  
Ino!: I guess.  
Ino!: You don’t talk about my situation, do you?  
Kid_Win: What do you mean?  
Ino!: With the others.  
Kid_Win: About you not sense-sharing for like two days?  
Ino!: Yeah, that thing.  
Kid_Win: I haven’t.  
Ino!: Well, please don’t.  
Ino!: It’s sort-of private.  
Kid_Win: I won’t, so long as it’s not something super important.  
Kid_Win: No gossiping or rumors or anything.  
Ino!: That’s reasonable.  
Ino!: Thank you.  
Kid_Win: Anyways, finish up your meal!  
Kid_Win: We have _science_ to do!  


  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Power of a Princess: A Conference Call Story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19215478) by [EtchJetty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EtchJetty/pseuds/EtchJetty)




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